Odd Spellcheck Behavior

[Bob Stringer]

I have Word 2000 SP3, running on WinXP.

I receive a news letter (WordTips) ) in .pdf format, and I
occasionally use Acrobat to convert it to rtf. It's a lot
easier this way, for example, to copy macros the newsletter
suggests, as opposed to typing them out by hand.

When I used Acrobat version 5 to do the initial conversion,
most (all?) of the words which contained the letters "fi"
and "fl" appeared with a period instead. For example, "file"
appeared as ".le" and I'd have to do a find and replace to
correct such words (and *boy* are there a lot of words that
contain "fi"!). That obviously was an Acrobat problem, which
I mention only by way of background, because it has
persisted into Acrobat 6, but with odd consequences in Word.

I recently upgraded to Acrobat 6. The conversions now *look*
fine. However, Word, using the usual squiggly red underline,
shows all words that contain "fi" and "fl" as misspelled.
I'm wondering what's going on here. Each "fi" *looks*
exactly like a normal "fi", but Word obviously thinks
otherwise. In fact, if I do a search and replace by copying
and pasting the offending words into both the "find what"
and "replace with" boxes, Word still shows the words as
misspelled. And if I *type* the offending word into both the
"find what" and "replace with" boxes, Word reports that it
didn't find such a word. The only way to get search and
replace to get rid of the "misspellings," therefore, is to
copy and paste the offending word into the "find what" box
but type it into the "replace with" box.

Another odd behavior: if I copy a "misspelled" word from
Word and paste it into a text editor, the "fi" is pasted as
a question mark. Thus, if I copy "file" in Word, it pastes
into the text editor as "?le".

Finally, I should correct my comment that *every* instance
is misspelled. That's not quite true. If an "fi" word
appears in a heading it's ok. There are a couple other odd
exceptions as well.

Any idea what's going on here? For example, is Word for
some reason treating the offending fi's as graphics rather
than text? I'm baffled.

Thanks.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Bob

What you're seeing in the document as two-letter combinations "fi" and
"fl" are really single characters called "ligatures". These characters
are present in some fonts and not in others. When they are present,
they have Unicode values FB01 and FB02, respectively. You can find
them in the Insert > Symbol dialog.

With Acrobat 5, presumably the translation from PDF to RTF either used
a font that doesn't contain the ligatures or mistranslated the
character values, while Acrobat 6 got a little smarter and uses the
right font and Unicode values. Word's spelling checker doesn't
recognize the ligatures to be part of the correct spellings, though.

When you copy from the text and paste into the Find What box, you're
copying the Unicode ligature; in the Replace With box you're entering
the separate characters. The replacement actually does something,
although it isn't visible to you.

 

[Bob Stringer]

[snip]

Got it.

Thanks very much for the explanation. I obviously still
have to do the search and replace, but at least now I know
why.

 

[Dayo Mitchell]

:

For example, "file"
appeared as ".le" and I'd have to do a find and replace to
correct such words (and *boy* are there a lot of words that
contain "fi"!).

The only way to get search and
replace to get rid of the "misspellings," therefore, is to
copy and paste the offending word into the "find what" box
but type it into the "replace with" box.

Hi Bob,
Instead of doing this word by word, Find will search for all "fi"s within
words, unless you have "match whole word" checked. Then you only have to
run two F&Rs, for "fi" and "fl".

For further extending the capabilities of F&R in even more complex
situations, see
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/UsingWildcards.htm
Although you shouldn't need wildcards for this situation.

DM

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

FWIW, I get WordTips in plain text format. If you're going to be
copying/pasting macros, you might find that more useful.

[snip]

Got it.

Thanks very much for the explanation. I obviously still
have to do the search and replace, but at least now I know
why.
--
Bob Stringer

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