Inconsistent Character Corruption

[djprius]

I sent an email with a Word 07 document attached. The recipient said
that a few "strange" characters appear in the document. I opened the
attachment and did not have the issue. However, I opened the attachment
on two other computers: one had the corruption and the other didn't.

The corruption was the improper insertion of punctuation: an opening
quotation mark was an "A", a closing quotation mark was an "@" and an
aposthophe was an "=".

I not so much interested in why there is a corruption as why does it
show on some computers and not others!!!

To recap: on 3 of my computers (all XP(sp3) and Word 07), two show NO
corruption, but one does. The original recipient, on two computers
(both running Word 03), shows the corruption.

David

 

[djprius]

I sent an email with a Word 07 document attached. The recipient said
that a few "strange" characters appear in the document. I opened the
attachment and did not have the issue. However, I opened the attachment
on two other computers: one had the corruption and the other didn't.

The corruption was the improper insertion of punctuation: an opening
quotation mark was an "A", a closing quotation mark was an "@" and an
aposthophe was an "=".

I not so much interested in why there is a corruption as why does it
show on some computers and not others!!!

To recap: on 3 of my computers (all XP(sp3) and Word 07), two show NO
corruption, but one does. The original recipient, on two computers (both
running Word 03), shows the corruption.

David

Oops. Just realized that on the two computers that do NOT show the
corruption, I have Word 2010 (beta). Document was created on that
version, too.

Hence, issue is that the document displays okay on Word 2010, but has
corruption when displayed in Word 07 and Word 03.

Document itself was created in .doc format and saved in .doc format.
However, and this may be the origination of the corruption, I copied the
paragraph that has the corruption from a third-party Word document and
inserted it into my document.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It's not "corruption" per se but rather a font issue. The substitution you
describe is typical of documents that originated (often many, many years
ago) in WordPerfect and use the WP Typographic Symbols font for quotation
marks, dashes, and other characters that were not present in the earliest
printer fonts. If you have the WP font installed on the system on which you
open the document (as you may well have if you ever had WordPerfect on the
system, or if you copied the contents of the Fonts folder over from an older
computer), then the document will appear correct, though you may notice that
contractions such as "can't" will be marked as misspelled because Word does
not see the apostrophe character as an apostrophe but rather as a symbol
from a symbol font.

You can get the documents to appear correct on any system by installing the
WP font, but this isn't really a solution. Unfortunately, you will have to
replace the characters with the correct ones from the Default Paragraph
Font. I've just looked at an old WP doc I received in this condition, and
when I select an equals sign, the font box reads WP Typographic Symbols. So
it should be possible to copy/paste the symbol into the "Find what" box of
the Replace dialog, type an apostrophe in the "Replace with" box, and
Replace All, with these caveats:

1. I don't currently have WP Typographic Symbols installed, so when I tried
to specify that font for the "Find what" text (by typing it in), Word
couldn't find it; if you do have it installed (as you apparently do), this
should work.

2. For the "Replace with" text, use Format | Style | Default Paragraph Font;
otherwise you'll get an apostrophe in MS Mincho or something.

Apostrophes are fairly simple if the document doesn't otherwise contain =
characters; same for @. The A characters will be the difficult ones; you'll
just have to do those one at a time. For more on replacing symbols (which
may help), see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MacrosVBA/FindReplaceSymbols.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Making it even more likely that it originated in WordPerfect.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[djprius]

Suzanne,

You are truly amazing! Not only are you well-versed on the current
versions of Word, but you bring a wealth of historical knowledge that is
incredible.

You are exactly right: The two computers of mine where the text
displays correctly have WordPerfect installed; the one computer I have
where the 'corrupted' text shows does *not* have WordPerfect installed.
(And I assume the recipient of my document has the corruption on both
of his computers because he does not have WP installed on either.)

Thanks.

David

P.S.- What is your view of the Ribbon now. (You delayed switching from
Word 03 to Word 07 in the beginning because of the steep learning curve,
as I recall.)

****************************************************************************

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm still using Word 2003 for production work and Word 2007 mostly for
reference in answering user questions. I did install only Office 2007 on my
new Windows 7 laptop, but I have not really used the laptop for anything
much yet. I think if I used Word 2007 all the time, there are some aspects
of it I would like, but there are some things that I do easily now that
would inevitably require more keystrokes in Word 2007, and I'm just not
ready to make the sacrifice.

People will tell you you can add anything you use frequently to the QAT, but
this is not always a viable option. For example, in Word 2003 I have toolbar
buttons for "Keep with next," "Keep lines together," and "Page break
before." These are helpful not only for applying this formatting to a
paragraph but also for telling, from their off/on state, how an existing
paragraph is formatted. These commands have no built-in button icon, so in
Word 2003 I have some beautiful button faces designed by Robert Franz (see
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/CustomToolbar.htm). I could add these
buttons to the QAT in Word 2007, but they'd all have green ball icons. So
instead, I've added the entire batch of them, along with others, as a custom
toolbar, but, in order to use them, I have to first click on the Custom
Toolbars button--one more click, AND I can't just glance up and see the
KWN/KLT/PBB state from the buttons.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[djprius]

I'm still using Word 2003 for production work and Word 2007 mostly for
reference in answering user questions. I did install only Office 2007 on
my new Windows 7 laptop, but I have not really used the laptop for
anything much yet. I think if I used Word 2007 all the time, there are
some aspects of it I would like, but there are some things that I do
easily now that would inevitably require more keystrokes in Word 2007,
and I'm just not ready to make the sacrifice.

People will tell you you can add anything you use frequently to the QAT,
but this is not always a viable option. For example, in Word 2003 I have
toolbar buttons for "Keep with next," "Keep lines together," and "Page
break before." These are helpful not only for applying this formatting
to a paragraph but also for telling, from their off/on state, how an
existing paragraph is formatted. These commands have no built-in button
icon, so in Word 2003 I have some beautiful button faces designed by
Robert Franz (see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/CustomToolbar.htm).
I could add these buttons to the QAT in Word 2007, but they'd all have
green ball icons. So instead, I've added the entire batch of them, along
with others, as a custom toolbar, but, in order to use them, I have to
first click on the Custom Toolbars button--one more click, AND I can't
just glance up and see the KWN/KLT/PBB state from the buttons.

The situation is slightly improved in Word 2010 Beta: KWN now has
its own icon (and also words -- which take a lot of QAT real estate) and
a check mark toggles on and off to alert you to the use of the feature
in a paragraph.

The other two items (KLT and PBB) are still the green globes,
unfortunately.