Lost document in bizarre circumstances

[Spookytooth]

I wrote a long and very private document (about my health if you must know),
and to prevent the kids reading it I altered the font to Marlett before
saving it. I reopened the document, selected the entire document and changed
the font back to Times. Result - squares! Row after row. I assume a square
represents an unprintable character

I've tried resaving as a plain text doc then opening it again but all I get
is page after page of question marks. Same if I open the .doc file in
Notepad.

There are no autorecovery or backup files to be found anywhere.

Anybody know what happened and how I might recover the original document??

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See "WD2002: Symbol Characters Are Changed to Box Characters" at
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=290978

 

[Spookytooth]

Thankyou, that worked a treat

Other readers may be interested to know another workaround that worked.

Cut and paste all the text that is in a symbol font (ie don't try to change
it to a non symbol font) into Wordpad

Then select all text in Wordpad, choose format, font and choose a non symbol
font and a text size. Eh voila! Your text is OK again. No idea why it works
but it does!1

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Thanks for confirming that pasting into WordPad works. I vaguely remembered
that but wasn't sure whether it was WordPad or NotePad. I think it may be
that WordPad doesn't fully support Unicode fonts.