Symbols and fonts

[newkindofsoup]

I am writing a book where people are sending me files containing
phonetic fonts for certain words within the text. They have entered
these words using the insert symbol function. The text I receive is
appearing with Greek symbols and not the SIL phonetic fonts (from
www.sil.org). I know that each author has used the same font as I have
had on my computer, but it must be the way they have entered it that
makes it not translate between computers.

When I highlight that section of text it says they have used Times New
Roman. When I highlight the text and change it to the SIL phonetic font
it still remains as looking like Greek symbols. The only way that I can
change it is to double click on each character individually, then
change the font from Symbol to the SIL font, then click insert, then
close the Symbol window, then double click on the next character. The
symbol they have typed in has the same character code as the correct
character in the SIL font.

I have around 70 chapters with hundreds of phonetic symbols in each -
it will be a long time if I need to use this 4 step process for each
one. Any ideas for speeding it up?

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi,

There are quite a few SIL phonetics fonts. The old ones didn't use Unicode.
Probably, the authors used one of those old fonts and you don't have it
installed.

So Word replaces it with some other symbol font... likely "Symbol", judging
by your description.

Look in "Tools > Options > Compatibility > Font substitution" for the font
that's missing on your machine. You should find it somewhere on the Internet
for free download.


It wouldn't be too hard to write a macro that replaces the old, non-Unicode
phonetics characters with the corresponding Unicode phonetics characters
either, so that you can change to a Unicode font such as "Doulos SIL". It's
just a lot of work.

Maybe there's already a macro out there to do that, maybe even from SIL...
haven't checked.

Regards,
Klaus