Pasting Excel to Word Problem: Arial is the culprit

[Klaus Kamppeter]

Hello

I had a persistent crossplatform problem with parts of Excel
Spreadsheets pasted as image into Word documents (Office 2004 with MacOS
10.3.7-9). Accented caracters (the ones used in spanish) frecuently
didn't show up and print correctly if the document was seen in Word for
Windows (I personnaly tried with Windows 2000 pro and Office 2000, but I
think it happens with other versions too, because of the complaints of
people I work with).

Now I have found out that it happens only when I use Arial in the pasted
spreadsheet. It doesn't happen at least with Trebuchet MS, Verdana,
Tahoma and Lucida Sans. I tried quite a lot of times with different
documents. Using Arial the accented caracters won't appear correctly on
the Windows-side, using other fonts, there is no problem.

I had similar problems with documents made with Office 98 and MacOS 9.1.
Maybe it was Arial too.

Bye


..

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Also, the Windows users may not have the current Unicode Arial font if
they are behind in upgrading to Office XP or Office 2003. If Windows
can't find the right font it substitutes something close, but often
wrong - especially when it comes to special characters.

-Jim

 

[Klaus Kamppeter]

I wonder whether you've got a font conflict (as discussed in my Take
Control eBook on Word). Make sure you're using the right Arial - the one
installed by Office, *not* the one that was probably already in your
top-level /Library or elsewhere. m.

It is true that there were 2 versions of Arial in the system: 3.05 in my
users library, 2.6 or 2.7 in the general library. I now installed the
3.05 in the general library too and made another test, with the same
result:
- all special caracters show up incorrectly on the windows-side with
Arial and with
Times New Roman
- they show up correctly with
Verdana
Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Arial Narrow
Arial Black
Lucida Sans

When I use a font that isn't installed in Windows it shows up correctly
too (Helvetica, Times).

I had similar problems before with office 98, and I suspect that it's a
more general problem that exist's for quite a time. I have seen some
posts from people that had similar problems, and poposed not to paste as
image at all, and open each spreadsheet on the Windows side.

Bye

 

[Klaus Kamppeter]

Also, the Windows users may not have the current Unicode Arial font if
they are behind in upgrading to Office XP or Office 2003.

On the Windows 2000 I used for testing there is:
Arial
Arial Unicode MS

I suppose the system should use the first one. The accented caracters I
am using are in the tradicional font sets on Mac and Windows, and a big
Unicode font I don't think that it should be necesary.

With other fonts that are on both sided it works just fine (besides
Times New Roman, that produces the same problem). Using fonts not
installed in Windows the font is substituted and doesn't have the same
aspect, but the current accented caracters reproduce correctly. Seems to
be just a problem with Arial and Times New Roman.

Bye

 

[Klaus Kamppeter]

Meanwhile I have made some more experiment. It definitively depends on
the version of office and/or OS used on the Windows side. The same
document opens fine with Word 97 on Windows 95, while with Office 2000
on Windows 2000 Arial and Times New Roman are not mapped correctly. I
had the same problem with people using Windows NT (I don't know with
which version of Office), using on my side Word 98 and 2001 (MacOS 9.1).
I don't know if it might happen with newer versions of Windows and
Office.

Bye

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Meanwhile I have made some more experiment. It definitively depends on

the version of office and/or OS used on the Windows side. The same
document opens fine with Word 97 on Windows 95, while with Office 2000
on Windows 2000 Arial and Times New Roman are not mapped correctly. I
had the same problem with people using Windows NT (I don't know with
which version of Office), using on my side Word 98 and 2001 (MacOS 9.1).
I don't know if it might happen with newer versions of Windows and
Office.

Can you try on a different machine? Since Arial and TNR are supposed to be
the standard cross-platform use-anywhere fonts, this seems really odd. Is
it possible that the Arial and TNR on the windows machine are corrupted?

Thanks for posting all this information, by the way.

 

[Klaus Kamppeter]

Can you try on a different machine?

I don't have an easy access to other machines with Windows and Office
right now.

Since Arial and TNR are supposed to be
the standard cross-platform use-anywhere fonts, this seems really odd. Is
it possible that the Arial and TNR on the windows machine are corrupted?

I doubt it. The text in the same Word document in Arial works and prints
just fine, with accented caracters. It's just the problem with Excel
spreadsheets pasted as image into the Word documents. And I had the same
problem during the last years with several other people receiving my
files. Normally I have set Helvetica as standard font in Excel, and only
sometimes I changed to Arial, thinking it could work better on Windows
machines. This might explain these ocasional problems, depending on the
font I used and the Word or Windows version they used.

Thanks for posting all this information, by the way.

I hope it helps somebody. For me, the workaround is using other fonts.

Bye

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Can you try on a different machine? Since Arial and TNR are supposed to be
the standard cross-platform use-anywhere fonts, this seems really odd. Is
it possible that the Arial and TNR on the windows machine are corrupted?

Note that the Arial in Mac Office 2004 is a much more limited (Latin
Extended, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Punctuation, etc. but not Asian or more
obscure scripts) Unicode font, like TNR - each has some 1200 characters -
than Arial Unicode MS on Windows - a monster font (22 MB or so, 51,000+
characters) encompassing the whole of the Unicode 3.2 character set. Verdana
and Trebuchet MS are "Pan-European" (Latin Extended, Cyrillic, Greek,
General Punctuation) - some 600 characters. (Check Alan Wood's
website/Fonts/Mac fonts for details and number of characters.) The Asian
Unicode fonts MS Mincho, Gothic, PMincho, PGothic, (all 15,000+, but fewer
than Windows versions) and Simsun (22,000+) (same on Mac as Windows) are
much bigger than the standard European ones.

--
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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