Symbol problems in Word 2004 for mac

[wanderer]

I am having a number of issues with the symbols in word 2004. When
viewing a document (in the mac version) created in a Windows version of
word some symbols appear as empty squares. If I want to insert symbols,
not all are accessible, even though I can view them in the window when
I insert they appear as the empty square.

When previewing the symbols in the window the associated unicode is
displayed, this code seems to be the same for the symbols in Webdings
and the symbols in Zapf Dingbats however the symbols are not the same,
and I believe the correct unicodes belong with the Webdings symbols.
E.g. 61652 is a rightward heavy arrow in Zapf Dingbats and some sort of
disc shaped symbol in Webdings.

Also, when using the formatting palette to insert symbols (under the
add object heading) some of the symbols when clicked do not display in
the document as they appear in the palette.

I should mention that I am using the student version of word 2004.

Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[matt neuburg]

I am having a number of issues with the symbols in word 2004. When
viewing a document (in the mac version) created in a Windows version of
word some symbols appear as empty squares. If I want to insert symbols,
not all are accessible, even though I can view them in the window when
I insert they appear as the empty square.

Please separate these issues. If you are having trouble entering
symbols, that's because you're doing it wrong. Don't use the Symbol
font; use the Mac OS X input menu and the Character Palette. (See my
Take Control book on Word 2004 for nauseatingly complete details.)

The issue where you can't see characters entered in the original
document using Windows is more interesting. I don't offhand know why
this would be, although my Take Control discusses (in excruciating
detail) why you wouldn't be able to see symbols from an older *Mac* Word
document; but email me a sentence (or the whole document) showing the
problem and I'll try to diagnose it for you. Thx - m.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

When previewing the symbols in the window the associated unicode is
displayed, this code seems to be the same for the symbols in Webdings
and the symbols in Zapf Dingbats however the symbols are not the same,
and I believe the correct unicodes belong with the Webdings symbols.
E.g. 61652 is a rightward heavy arrow in Zapf Dingbats and some sort of
disc shaped symbol in Webdings.

61652 = xF0D4, which is in the private-use area of Unicode.
You rather mean character xD4 in Zapf Dingbats, which is character
x2794 = 10132 in Unicode.
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/DINGBATS.TXT

Character xD4 in Webdings is something else.
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html

 

[matt neuburg]

61652 = xF0D4, which is in the private-use area of Unicode.
You rather mean character xD4 in Zapf Dingbats, which is character
x2794 = 10132 in Unicode.
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/DINGBATS.TXT

Character xD4 in Webdings is something else.
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html

OK, but if he's right and it *is* a private use character, that would
explain why it isn't coming out properly on Mac (in the absence of the
very same font). This is one of the things I would like to ascertain,
which is why I asked to be sent an example from the troublesome
document. m.

 

[Tim Murray]

I am having a number of issues with the symbols in word 2004. When
viewing a document (in the mac version) created in a Windows version of
word some symbols appear as empty squares. If I want to insert symbols,
not all are accessible, even though I can view them in the window when
I insert they appear as the empty square.

When previewing the symbols in the window the associated unicode is
displayed, this code seems to be the same for the symbols in Webdings
and the symbols in Zapf Dingbats however the symbols are not the same,
and I believe the correct unicodes belong with the Webdings symbols.
E.g. 61652 is a rightward heavy arrow in Zapf Dingbats and some sort of
disc shaped symbol in Webdings.

I have little knowledge of Unicode, but I do know Webdings (TrueType) and
Zapf Dingbats (Type 1), and they are completely different glyphs and don't
contain any Unicode tables. The "match" for Zapf Dingbats in the Microsoft
TrueType world is Monotype Sorts.

I disagree with Matt about not using the Symbol font. Its glyphs are the same
between Type 1 and TrueType and the same between Mac and Windows, and it
absolutely has never failed for me (I do a lot of math, engineering, etc.).

 

[Tim Murray]

I disagree with Matt about not using the Symbol font. Its glyphs are the same

between Type 1 and TrueType and the same between Mac and Windows, and it
absolutely has never failed for me (I do a lot of math, engineering, etc.).

Just wanted to add something. First of all, read the excellent info at
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/InsertSpecChars.htm.

Second: One reason that Symbol may have always worked for me is that I stick
to Styles in a very hard-core way. I NEVER select a paragraph and reassign a
different font to it via a font menu; I use a specific style. Also, I even go
so far as to use character tags called, appropriately enough, Symbol or
ZapfDinbats, for instance, for special characters in those fonts.

Also, it was, I guess, not entirely accurate to say that Webdings didn't
contain any Unicode "tables". Near the end of that link is more explanation
of this, but what I meant to point out was that if you use the Font
Properties extension and view the CharSet/Unicode tab, you see that the
supported Unicode pages area is blank. Webdings contains only 227 glyphs, and
they are all in the standard symbol range (again, see the Web site).

 

[matt neuburg]

I disagree with Matt about not using the Symbol font

Nevertheless the fact is that there is a clear bug in the way Word 2004
treats it (which you can easily evoke for yourself; I document it in
hair-greying detail in my ebook on the subject) which can cause boxes to
appear instead of glyphs, and people are having trouble with documents
inherited from earlier versions for this reason, so it is better
avoided. If *you* have not experienced these difficulties, that's nice,
but it does not mean that others have not.

However, we still don't know what the OP's real problem is, since we
have not seen his document yet. The last time something like this came
up it turned out (on receipt of the document) that the poster had
completely misdescribed what the phenomenon was, so it's a good thing to
reserve judgment until we can see the evidence. m.

 

[Clive Huggan]

... I stick to Styles in a very hard-core way....

Ah! That makes six of us, Tim!!

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
============================================================

 

[wanderer]

I may have realized a different problem. I realize that I do not have
the full complement of symbol/font sets. I do not have the wingding
sets, this may be why I am unable to use some symbols.

I made sure that I have all fonts installed and enabled in Mac OS X,
and I reinstalled MS office 2004 (for mac) to ensure that I did a full
install to get all the font sets, but it did not work. I did all the
updates for the software and I am still missing at least the wingding
symbols/fonts and maybe more.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

I may have realized a different problem. I realize that I do not have
the full complement of symbol/font sets. I do not have the wingding
sets, this may be why I am unable to use some symbols.

I made sure that I have all fonts installed and enabled in Mac OS X,
and I reinstalled MS office 2004 (for mac) to ensure that I did a full
install to get all the font sets, but it did not work. I did all the
updates for the software and I am still missing at least the wingding
symbols/fonts and maybe more.

The Wingdings, Wingdings 2, and Wingdings 3 are in fact part of
the Office 2004 for mac install. However, after you have done an
install, those fonts STILL are not available to you until you run
an office application like Word for the first time. Although your
reinstall is new, Office thinks that you have been running Word
before (i.e., before the install!) so it ain't installing the
fonts for you. This is all flagged by the presence of the file:

"~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 11 First Run"

Since it's located in your home area, it obviously wasn't
affected by the reinstallation of office. Anyway, just delete
that file ("Office 11 First Run") and then start up Word. Office
will now think that you are running Word for the very first time
and will dump it's entire load of Fonts on you (or more
specifically in your ~/Library/Fonts folder).

Note that there will be duplicates of several of the MS fonts
with fonts already in your system (e.g., Arial). Also note that
the MS fonts are usually a bit newer in version number than the
ones currently provided with the current OS X releases. If you do
a resolve on the duplicates from Font Book, the older version
ones (i.e., all the Mac originate ones) will be disabled for you.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

The Wingdings, Wingdings 2, and Wingdings 3 are in fact part of the
Office 2004 for mac install. However, after you have done an install,
those fonts STILL are not available to you until you run an office
application like Word for the first time. Although your reinstall is
new, Office thinks that you have been running Word before (i.e., before
the install!) so it ain't installing the fonts for you. This is all
flagged by the presence of the file:

"~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 11 First Run"

Since it's located in your home area, it obviously wasn't affected by
the reinstallation of office. Anyway, just delete that file ("Office 11
First Run") and then start up Word. Office will now think that you are
running Word for the very first time and will dump it's entire load of
Fonts on you (or more specifically in your ~/Library/Fonts folder).

Note that there will be duplicates of several of the MS fonts with fonts
already in your system (e.g., Arial). Also note that the MS fonts are
usually a bit newer in version number than the ones currently provided
with the current OS X releases. If you do a resolve on the duplicates
from Font Book, the older version ones (i.e., all the Mac originate
ones) will be disabled for you.

Oh, I forgot to mention, if you happened to have done some
moderate trimming of your installed fonts but left any of the
eight Microsoft truetype fonts that come with Office on your
system, my previous instructions are not complete. These are the
large Asian fonts that come with Office:

Batang.ttf
Gulim.ttf
MS Gothic.ttf
MS Mincho.ttf
MS PGothic.ttf
MS PMincho.ttf
PMingLiu.ttf
SimSun.ttf

One of these fonts (I think it's the PMincho but not positive) is
used by Office to decide whether or not to reinstall all of the
fonts. If it finds that one font on your system, it thinks that
they are ALL there and won't install. So if these fonts are
installed in one of your font folders, they'll need to be removed
along with the "Office 11 First Run" file in order for your fresh
set of fonts to be installed.

BTW, although only one of above mentioned fonts is used as the
control flag, I mention all of them here because they all have a
similar problem that I have observed on OS 10.3.6. They tend to
foul up the Font Book utility. If you do NOT see any of these
fonts by using the Font Book utility, that does NOT mean they are
not installed, only that Font Book's manipulation of the ATS
environment may have broken making those fonts invisible. For
these eight fonts, the only positive way of knowing if they have
been deleted from the system is to go look into any of the Font
folders where they may have been installed previously (e.g.
/Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts, etc.).

 

[Alan Wood]

I disagree with Matt about not using the Symbol font. Its glyphs are the same
between Type 1 and TrueType and the same between Mac and Windows, and it
absolutely has never failed for me (I do a lot of math, engineering,

etc.).

I have a test HTML page for the Symbol font that I produced using the
Windows version of the Symbol font.

When viewed using I.E. on a Mac, the Greek letters work, but lots of other
characters do not. I am pretty sure that the Windows and Mac versions of
Symbol font do NOT have all of their characters at the same code points.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I have a test HTML page for the Symbol font that I produced using the
Windows version of the Symbol font.

When viewed using I.E. on a Mac, the Greek letters work, but lots of other
characters do not. I am pretty sure that the Windows and Mac versions of
Symbol font do NOT have all of their characters at the same code points.

You are wrong! The Symbol font has the same character mapping on
Macintosh, Windows, and Unix:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/SYMBOL.TXT
However, if you use expressions (see below) or set the
encoding to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, then an additional transcoding
ISO-8859-1 -> MacRoman takes place.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

| <font face="Symbol" size="+2">Ä</font>

This is bullshit! Ä is always the Latin letter "A with diaeresis".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

What you _could_ write is this:
[charset=x-user-defined] <font face="Symbol">Ä</font>
That is, you need to set the encoding to "user-defined", not UTF-8
or ISO-8859-1 and you need to use 8-bit-characters, not numerical
character references.

I'm sorry to say this, but your page
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html
is bullshit.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I have a test HTML page for the Symbol font that I produced using the
Windows version of the Symbol font.

When viewed using I.E. on a Mac, the Greek letters work, but lots of other
characters do not. I am pretty sure that the Windows and Mac versions of
Symbol font do NOT have all of their characters at the same code points.

You are wrong! The Symbol font has the same character mapping on
Macintosh, Windows, and Unix:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/SYMBOL.TXT
However, if you use expressions (see below) or set the
encoding to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, then an additional transcoding
ISO-8859-1 -> MacRoman takes place.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

| <font face="Symbol" size="+2">Ä</font>

This is bullshit! Ä is always the Latin letter "A with diaeresis".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

What you _could_ write is this:
[charset=x-user-defined] <font face="Symbol">Ä</font>
That is, you need to set the encoding to "user-defined", not UTF-8
or ISO-8859-1 and you need to use 8-bit-characters, not numerical
character references.

I'm sorry to say this, but your page
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html
is bullshit.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I have a test HTML page for the Symbol font that I produced using the
Windows version of the Symbol font.

When viewed using I.E. on a Mac, the Greek letters work, but lots of other
characters do not. I am pretty sure that the Windows and Mac versions of
Symbol font do NOT have all of their characters at the same code points.

You are wrong! The Symbol font has the same character mapping on
Macintosh, Windows, and Unix:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/SYMBOL.TXT
However, if you use expressions (see below) or set the
encoding to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, then an additional transcoding
ISO-8859-1 -> MacRoman takes place.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

| <font face="Symbol" size="+2">Ä</font>

This is b*llsh*t! Ä is always the Latin letter "A with diaeresis".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

What you _could_ write is this:
[charset=x-user-defined] <font face="Symbol">Ä</font>
That is, you need to set the encoding to "user-defined", not UTF-8
or ISO-8859-1 and you need to use 8-bit-characters, not numerical
character references.

I'm sorry to say this, but your page
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html
is b*llsh*t.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Andreas,

I don't get that at all. Perhaps you can help me?

| <font face="Symbol" size="+2">Ä</font>

This is b*llsh*t! Ä is always the Latin letter "A with diaeresis".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

What you _could_ write is this:
[charset=x-user-defined] <font face="Symbol">Ä</font>

That happens to work because the "Ä" has the code 196 both on the Mac and the PC (Unicode, ISO 8859-1).
But what about any character that isn't the same, say 182?
The numeric character reference ¶ would still work, but with the character, you'd get transcoding problems.

Regards,
Klaus

I have a test HTML page for the Symbol font that I produced using the
Windows version of the Symbol font.

When viewed using I.E. on a Mac, the Greek letters work, but lots of other
characters do not. I am pretty sure that the Windows and Mac versions of
Symbol font do NOT have all of their characters at the same code points.

You are wrong! The Symbol font has the same character mapping on
Macintosh, Windows, and Unix:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/SYMBOL.TXT
However, if you use expressions (see below) or set the
encoding to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1, then an additional transcoding
ISO-8859-1 -> MacRoman takes place.

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html

| <font face="Symbol" size="+2">Ä</font>

This is b*llsh*t! Ä is always the Latin letter "A with diaeresis".
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html

What you _could_ write is this:
[charset=x-user-defined] <font face="Symbol">Ä</font>
That is, you need to set the encoding to "user-defined", not UTF-8
or ISO-8859-1 and you need to use 8-bit-characters, not numerical
character references.

I'm sorry to say this, but your page
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html
is b*llsh*t.

 

[Tim Murray]

One of these fonts (I think it's the PMincho but not positive) is
used by Office to decide whether or not to reinstall all of the
fonts. If it finds that one font on your system, it thinks that
they are ALL there and won't install. So if these fonts are
installed in one of your font folders, they'll need to be removed
along with the "Office 11 First Run" file in order for your fresh
set of fonts to be installed.

For my system, with Office 2004, those fonts are not required, meaning that
Office does not reinstall them for me. But if PMincho is not installed, when
PowerPoint is launched, it complaints ... three or four times ... that it's
missing.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

For my system, with Office 2004, those fonts are not required, meaning that
Office does not reinstall them for me. But if PMincho is not installed, when
PowerPoint is launched, it complaints ... three or four times ... that it's
missing.

Yea, I know about that one. Another dumb software developer
choice. Why is a huge Asian font mandatory for a North American
English installation of PowerPoint?

About the other fonts though, if they are missing, anytime a new
user account attempts to run an office application for the first
time, they will get the entire font family placed in their home
Fonts folder, even if most of them were already installed in the
/Library/Fonts folder. This will continue for each new user on
the system or everytime someone runs an office application after
deleting preferences, etc.. If you are running a network, the
same will occur for everyone on the network so you will have a
lot of backup storage space being eaten up with multiple copies
of Office's font set.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

Yea, I know about that one. Another dumb software developer choice. Why
is a huge Asian font mandatory for a North American English installation
of PowerPoint?

About the other fonts though, if they are missing, anytime a new user
account attempts to run an office application for the first time, they
will get the entire font family placed in their home Fonts folder, even
if most of them were already installed in the /Library/Fonts folder.
This will continue for each new user on the system or everytime someone
runs an office application after deleting preferences, etc.. If you are
running a network, the same will occur for everyone on the network so
you will have a lot of backup storage space being eaten up with multiple
copies of Office's font set.

BTW, I thought I had heard it was the MS PMincho font that was
needed to keep PP happy, but on my system, I've discovered that
it is actually the MS PGothic font that is needed to keep my PP
quiet. I've tried it with MS PMincho present and the others
missing but PP kept squawking. It wasn't until I installed MS
PGothic and removed MS PMincho that PP shut up about the missing
font.

If I remember correctly, this sounds different from what I had
heard before and from what Tim just said. Maybe something has
changed (wouldn't be a big surprise, now would it?)

I'm currently running OS 10.3.8 and Office 2004 for mac (think
it's version 11.1.0 but not sure since I've not figured out how
to tell what version of Office I have installed

 

[Alan Wood]

I'm sorry to say this, but your page
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/symbol.html
is b*llsh*t.

You have failed to realise that the purpose of this page is to demonstrate
the problems of using Symbol font in Web pages, and to provide Unicode
equivalents for as many Symbol characters as possible.