MS Mincho font support in Entourage.v.X

[Ken]

Hi,

I've been using the Osaka font which came with OS X as the default font to
be used by Entourage v.X when displaying Japanese-encoded emails. Lately,
I have been receiving Word documents via email which contain Japanese text
composed on Windows using the MS Mincho font. Manually converting the
MS Mincho text in the Word document to Osaka has been less than ideal, due
to differences in the font sizes at a given point size. So I copied the
msmincho.ttc from my Windows machine to my Mac and installed it. This
worked fine for displaying the MS Mincho-formatted Word documents, but
in Entourage, the Japanese text of the emails is not spaced properly
(all of the characters are crowded so close together that they are
barely legible). I did more research and discovered that there are
apparently two different MS Mincho font files, one for Windows and one
for OS X. Apparently the garbled Japanese emails were composed with
MS Mincho, and now that it exists on my Mac, it's being used, but
the spacing problem is probably due to the font not being the OS X
version. When I didn't have MS Mincho at all on my machine, the
default font, Osaka, was used, and displayed properly. This leads
me to the following questions:

1) Is there any place where a legal Office v.X user can download the
OS X version of the MS Mincho font? It seems to me that since I've
paid for a Microsoft Office product that there should be someplace
where I can get this font.

2) An alternative to getting the OS X version of the MS Mincho font
would be a way to tell Entourage to ignore the font used to compose
any incoming Japanese-encoded email and to always display using
the Osaka font. This would allow me to continue to use the Windows
version of the MS Mincho font for displaying and printing Word
documents which use it, but using the Osaka font to display my
Japanese-encoded emails.

Thank you.

Ken

 

[Remo Del Bello]

1) Is there any place where a legal Office v.X user can download the
OS X version of the MS Mincho font? It seems to me that since I've
paid for a Microsoft Office product that there should be someplace
where I can get this font.

Well...if you download the Office 2004 Test Drive <http://tinyurl.com/4l6lc>
you should get the font. I don't believe the Test Drive uninstaller removes
the fonts, so...

-Remo Del Bello

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

1) Is there any place where a legal Office v.X user can download the
OS X version of the MS Mincho font? It seems to me that since I've
paid for a Microsoft Office product that there should be someplace
where I can get this font.

MS Mincho.ttf comes with, and is installed by, Microsoft Office 2004. So I
suggest you upgrade to Office 2004.

It is one of the Unicode fonts in Office 2004. Although Entourage has been
able to do Unicode for a while, Word, Excel and PowerPoint could not do so
in previous versions, e.g. Office v. X. Therefore Office v. X could not
supply it. (The cost of making Word Unicode-savvy in 2004 is rumored to have
been over $1,000,000.) The upgrade price is well worth it for all the
features you get, not least Unicode.

I do not know what would happen if you somehow got hold of a copy of MS
Mincho.ttf from a user of of Office 2004 - which is probably illegal - and
put it into ~/Library/Fonts/. It might work in Entourage X, which is
Unicode-savvy, or it might not. I'd really recommend upgrading to Office
2004.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

 

[Ken]

Paul,

Thanks for the information. But now I¹m wondering if even that would work.
Since I¹ve now
discovered that the Windows and OS X versions of the MS Mincho fonts seem to
have a
different spacing between characters, if I upgraded to Office 2004, do you
think that a
Word document using the MS Mincho font and created with a Windows version of
Word
would display properly when opened in Word 2004? I¹m thinking that I might
have a similar
character spacing issue as I did with Entourage using the Windows version of
the MS Mincho
font. Do you have experience handling cross-platform Word documents which
use the
MS Micho font, and if so, could you confirm that docs created on a Windows
system display
and print in the same manner with no need to adjust the point size or to
make any other
adjustments?

Thanks,

Ken