Reading older files with Word v.X and 2004

[rhead16]

I have plenty of older Word files (going back to 1.0!), but my current
(weird) problem is with some files saved as Word 5 or 5.1 (I don't
recall).

When I try to open them in Word 2004 (iBook, current system), many of
them are unreadable. The basic blocking and even text formatting like
italics are preserved...but every character is replaced with a little
rectangle. Oddly, if I try changing the font, a few lines of the
original text will reappear. If I keep doing this (switching back and
forth between two fonts) more and more appears, but with garbles and
lost sections, and it eventually gets stuck.

However: the files look perfectly good in Word v.X on my older G4
running OS 10.3.9.

Even odder: I thought maybe I could "rescue" the files for Word 2004 by
saving them as .txt (since they are plain text). When I do that, I get
another unreadable file....each character is represented by a dash.
(This is true whether I view the .txt file in Word v.X, Word 2004, or
TextEdit.

Clearly, something is corrupt (or at least not readable) in my original
files...but what do I do next. There seems to be NO way to take what is
a perfectly readable file in Word v.X (saved into Word v.X, of course)
and make it into a useable Word 2004 file.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

What font are these files using?

You might want to try setting a different font when you have them open in
Word X, and see if Word 2004 then reads them okay from a different font. Try
Arial or Times New Roman. Do this on a COPY.

Are these files using the basic 26-character alphabet, or do they have any
funky characters with accents, etc?

You might also want to try saving as RTF from Word X.

 

[RHead16]

Thanks, Daiya.

The files were originally in Courier. They do have some umlauts and
accents, but nothing weirder than that.

I've tried the "change font in vX", then save and move to OS 10.4.2/MS
2004 machine: no luck. Haven't tried RTF, yet. The problem that "save
as text" gives only dashes, not text, is true for vX machine as well as
v2004 machine, oddly.

Keep the advice coming, folks...

Thanks!

 

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

Ah hah! I think I know what the problem "is" I'm just not sure how to
fix it.

The older versions of Word had the ability to add characters to documents as
"embedded symbols". There was no indication that it had done this, other
than the fact that the character inspection macro I use to solve these
problems returns the same value (I think it's "20", a "space") for each
character. Each character becomes a "symbol field", which is an embedded
field that contains the character and a specification of the font.

Saving as RTF "should" bring the characters out as normal characters, with
the font set to something unavailable. Having saved as RTF, you should be
able to change the font.

Hope this helps

Thanks, Daiya.

The files were originally in Courier. They do have some umlauts and
accents, but nothing weirder than that.

I've tried the "change font in vX", then save and move to OS 10.4.2/MS
2004 machine: no luck. Haven't tried RTF, yet. The problem that "save
as text" gives only dashes, not text, is true for vX machine as well as
v2004 machine, oddly.

Keep the advice coming, folks...

Thanks!

--

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 4 1209 1410