Missing characters/unusable font in Word 2004

[jonathan]

I recently upgraded from Office X to Office 2004. Just now I tried
opening a document (my resume, of all things) and found that some
characters have been replaced by boxes. The missing characters are
from the font "Hoefler Text Ornaments", which is still installed on my
machine and is still usable by other applications. (This font has a
nice pair of characters, a sun and a moon, that I had been using as
bullets). Needless to say, this worked fine in Word X.

The font is listed in MS Word's Font menu, but it doesn't behave like
other fonts. If I select it and start typing, the characters appear as
boxes. If I then highlight these boxes and select a new font, the
characters are then printed appropriately for the newly selected font.
However, the reverse is not true: if I select text and then try to
change its font to Hoefler Text Ornaments, the command is ignored and
the font is unchanged.

Word does recognize Hoefler Text Ornaments as a symbol font. If I
select Insert -> Symbol..., it does appear in the list of avalable
fonts. However, when I select it the array of available characters do
not show the Hoefler Text Ornaments character set.

At this point I don't even remember all the things I've tried doing to
either test diagnose or work around this. I tried using the Mac OS
Character Palate, selecting the desired character and clicking on
"Insert with Font", but I get an error message stating "Couldn't set
the application font. Please set it to 'Hoefler Text Ornaments' in the
application." Of course, it still tells me this regardless of what the
font is set to. I tried quitting Word and trashing
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Font Substitutes, but that made no
difference. I used Apple's "Font Book" application to validate the
font, but no problems were found. I did use Font Book to deactivate
the Classic Mac OS verison, but that didn't help. I'm also still able
to insert these characters in any other application I've tried. I
suppose I could trash Office 2004 and reinstall Office X (I still have
the installer discs for that), but I'd rather avoid doing so if I can.

I'm running out of ideas here. Any suggestions?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Jonathan:

I would start by trashing the OS and Office Font Cache's then rebooting the
computer.

That will flush all of the font caches and rebuild them.

I am suspecting that the problem is along the lines of "I know the font is
there, but it's not where I left it..."

Hope this helps

I recently upgraded from Office X to Office 2004. Just now I tried
opening a document (my resume, of all things) and found that some
characters have been replaced by boxes. The missing characters are
from the font "Hoefler Text Ornaments", which is still installed on my
machine and is still usable by other applications. (This font has a
nice pair of characters, a sun and a moon, that I had been using as
bullets). Needless to say, this worked fine in Word X.

The font is listed in MS Word's Font menu, but it doesn't behave like
other fonts. If I select it and start typing, the characters appear as
boxes. If I then highlight these boxes and select a new font, the
characters are then printed appropriately for the newly selected font.
However, the reverse is not true: if I select text and then try to
change its font to Hoefler Text Ornaments, the command is ignored and
the font is unchanged.

Word does recognize Hoefler Text Ornaments as a symbol font. If I
select Insert -> Symbol..., it does appear in the list of avalable
fonts. However, when I select it the array of available characters do
not show the Hoefler Text Ornaments character set.

At this point I don't even remember all the things I've tried doing to
either test diagnose or work around this. I tried using the Mac OS
Character Palate, selecting the desired character and clicking on
"Insert with Font", but I get an error message stating "Couldn't set
the application font. Please set it to 'Hoefler Text Ornaments' in the
application." Of course, it still tells me this regardless of what the
font is set to. I tried quitting Word and trashing
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Font Substitutes, but that made no
difference. I used Apple's "Font Book" application to validate the
font, but no problems were found. I did use Font Book to deactivate
the Classic Mac OS verison, but that didn't help. I'm also still able
to insert these characters in any other application I've tried. I
suppose I could trash Office 2004 and reinstall Office X (I still have
the installer discs for that), but I'd rather avoid doing so if I can.

I'm running out of ideas here. Any suggestions?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[jonathan]

Hi there John,

Thanks for the tip. It took me all day to be able to wrap up a couple
of things so I could close the windows and reboot. I'm afraid that
nothing has changed. MS Word 2004 handles "Hoefler Text Ornaments"
exactly as I described before.

Just to be sure that I followed your suggestion correctly, the
following are the files I removed before rebooting:
* ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11)
* 3 files from ~/Library/Caches/ (com.apple.FCacheClassicDomain,
com.apple.FCacheUserDomain, and com.microsoft.browserfont.cache)
* the entire folder /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/

What would you suggest next?

BTW, I haven't mentioned that I'm doing all this on a PowerBook G4
running OS X 10.4.5. However, I've seen similar behavior on my desktop
machine (a PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.3.9 which I had also just
updated from Office X to Office 2004). On that machine I only opened
my resume and saw the bullets missing; I haven't tried any diagnosing
or debugging.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi there John,

Thanks for the tip. It took me all day to be able to wrap up a couple
of things so I could close the windows and reboot. I'm afraid that
nothing has changed. MS Word 2004 handles "Hoefler Text Ornaments"
exactly as I described before.

Just to be sure that I followed your suggestion correctly, the
following are the files I removed before rebooting:
* ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11)
* 3 files from ~/Library/Caches/ (com.apple.FCacheClassicDomain,
com.apple.FCacheUserDomain, and com.microsoft.browserfont.cache)
* the entire folder /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/

What would you suggest next?

BTW, I haven't mentioned that I'm doing all this on a PowerBook G4
running OS X 10.4.5. However, I've seen similar behavior on my desktop
machine (a PowerMac G4 running OS X 10.3.9 which I had also just
updated from Office X to Office 2004). On that machine I only opened
my resume and saw the bullets missing; I haven't tried any diagnosing
or debugging.

After a couple of experiments, I've decided that Word 2004 just does
not like Heofler Text Ornaments.

I can reproduce your problem exactly here. Word X will display Herr
Hoefler's ornaments happily. Word 2004 draws boxes. Word X opens the
file with the boxes in and displays the ornaments. (In fact I was
rather surprised to see that it automatically generated a "recovered"
file from my still open attempts to make 2004 behave.)

It seems that the ornaments behave like symbol in Word X, but the
transition to Unicode adds 0xF000 to the symbol. E.g the ornament that
you get by typing a lower case a (0x0061) in Word X becomes 0xF061
which is up in the "Private Use" area of Unicode.
If, in Word 2004, you select Hoefler Text ornamants, and type "ababab"
you get six boxes. You can copy and paste that into Omnigraffe (a well
behaved Unicode application) and Word's boxes become the correct
ornaments. So Word almost gets it right, but not quite.

Alternatively, if you select a single ornament character (one of the
boxes) in Word 2004, then ask the character palette to "display
selected character in application" (It's under the gear icon at the
bottom left of its expanded window) it will prove to you that Word 2004
inserted the "correct" private area character.

If you try the same trick in Word X, it is even weirder. Every
ornament, while displaying properly, appears to the character palette
as 0x005F, yet, if you copy and paste the same character into Font
Book's Custom Preview, and then ask Character Palette what character it
is, It's an "a" 0x0061.

Word x, even though it is not a Unicode application, will happily
display the Unicode ornaments created in 2004 correctly, but Word 2004
cannot do so.
Furthermore, when Word 2004 opens a file created in Word X and
containing non-unicode ornaments, it correctly translates each ornament
to the proper Unicode character and then wusses out when trying to
display them.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing wrong with my fonts or font cache. It
looks like a Word 2004 bug to me.

I'd love to be proved wrong by someone who can get Hoefler ornaments to
display properly in Word 2004.

Finally, if you insist on your sun and moon, (0xF074 and 5) might I
suggest a baroque workaround... make eps's of them in something else,
(I used OmniGraffle to test the theory) then insert as pictures. OK OK
it is horrible, but would be a decent way to use the ornaments as
Hoefler intended - for constucting a frieze border from alternating
pairs of ornaments.

PS. I can see why you like them. They are stunning looking glyphs.
Funny and stylish at the same time.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Elliott -

I'd love to be proved wrong by someone who can get Hoefler ornaments to
display properly in Word 2004

It won't be me! I've tried any number of ways & it *Just Don't Work*... The
boxes are all Word '04 will display. Also attempted through Insert>Symbol,
but selecting Hoefler Text Ornaments displays Romans & inserts boxes - even
though the info at the bottom of the dialog box reads:

"Insert Hoefler Text Ornaments character 98 (Unicode character 61538)".

I even tried typing some in InDesign CS2, then copy & paste to Word with the
same dismal result. But here is one more potential piece to the puzzle:
apparently the font is designed in such a way that "Ornaments" is actually
an alternative style for Hoefler Text font just the same as bold & italic.
Even Font Book lists Ornaments as a subordinate to Hoefler Text, not as a
separate font.

It's handled the same way in ID, but apparently Word can't deal with it.

Regards |:>)

 

[kretschmer]

I'm having this problem with the Symbol font.. However, even in the
Symbol palette inside Word, there are quite a lot of positions now
which show just as rectangles

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Whatever Your Name Is:

That's not actually a bug: that's a feature

In the Insert>Symbol dialog, what you see is a matrix table that shows all
of the "slots" in the character range of the font, and a picture of the
glyph that is in each.

The idea is that you are supposed to be able to figure out what the
character number of a glyph is by its position in the table. Symbol is a
very small font that contains few glyphs, so several of those positions are
"intentionally blank", there is no glyph in Symbol at that character
address.

This is an old mechanism designed in the pre-Unicode days when "character
number" was important. Now, we don't care what character number a glyph has
in a font, we're only interested in its Unicode value. You notice that down
the bottom of the dialog, it tells you what the Unicode value for each glyph
actually is. The new version of this dialog will simply show the Unicode
value and Name, just like Font Book does.

In the meantime, check the version of your font: I have two on my system.
One installed by the Classic environment is version 3.5 from 2000. This is
a font suitcase and is fairly limited. The other is version 4.1d3 from
2003. It's a Unicode datafork true-type font that has a wider range of
characters available.

You may want to check that you have the correct version enabled on your
system.

Cheers

I'm having this problem with the Symbol font.. However, even in the
Symbol palette inside Word, there are quite a lot of positions now
which show just as rectangles

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Huh? According to you, John, if it isn't what the user expects
("software behaviour that does not conform to the CUSTOMER's requirements" ­
direct quote), then it's a bug <vbeg>.

Beth

 

[Elliott Roper]

Huh? According to you, John, if it isn't what the user expects
("software behaviour that does not conform to the CUSTOMER's requirements" ­
direct quote), then it's a bug <vbeg>.
Kaching!!!!

The sad thing is that John will admit you are right. It is a bug. One
of many.
Once again we will pay the new version tax.
Once again there will be as many new bugs as old ones are fixed.
Does anyone detect a pa*@£#
NO CARRIER

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

The only user who requires particular feature is a VBA coder who needs to
know what the flaming character number is when working in a non-Unicode
font.

Now how do you feel?

Huh? According to you, John, if it isn't what the user expects
("software behaviour that does not conform to the CUSTOMER's requirements" ­
direct quote), then it's a bug <vbeg>.

Beth

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

I feel fine . How do you feel?

Beth

The only user who requires particular feature is a VBA coder who needs to
know what the flaming character number is when working in a non-Unicode
font.

Now how do you feel?

 

[Clive Huggan]

OK, time for medication, sweeties! ;-)))

[anon]
<g,d&r>
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