symbols in PC .doc files not showing up when opened in office X word

[Margret L.]

I receive documents from a researcher who uses up and down arrows to
indicate increases and decreases in word tables- she is using a PC. If
the doc is opened on another PC the arrows show up but if I open the
doc on my mac with the latest Word for X the arrows are replace with _
(an underscore). These tables are naturally useless with out the up
and down arrows...any ideas?

 

[Mark]

Ask the author what font the symbols are. That's a key factor.

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi Margret,

Microsoft has a feature article that may of interest to you.
Share Word for Mac documents with Word for Windows users
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/wordx/using.aspx?pid=usingwordx&type=
howto&article=/mac/LIBRARY/feature_articles/officex/wd_crossplatform.xml>

The cause of the problem is that even though the font name may be the same,
the characters may not be the same in the Windows font and the Mac font.

One way to eliminate this problem is to stick with OpenType fonts.
"OpenType® is a new cross-platform font file format developed jointly by
Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe has converted the entire Adobe Type Library into
this format and now offers thousands of OpenType fonts. "
http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.html

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

All responses should be made to this newsgroup within the same thread.
Thanks.

About Microsoft MVPs:
http://www.mvps.org/

Search for help with the free Google search Excel add-in:
<http://www.rondebruin.nl/Google.htm>

 

[John McGhie [MVP]]

On the PC these days, symbols are in "no particular font". The PC encodes
symbols as Unicode. Unicode character numbers run from 0 to 32,767 and
contain almost every character there is (Unicode 3 goes to 64,000 or
something...). This means the font of the character on the PC is now
irrelevant, and can be "anything".

The PC will look only at the font "family" then produce the character from
the nearest font of that family that contains it. That's the way Unicode
works.

To test this, save a section of your document as RTF, then open it in
TextEdit. You should see the correct symbols (TextEdit is a Cocoa
application that supports Unicode, Carbon applications such as Word for Mac
have trouble with Unicode).

If the symbols are there and correct in TextEdit, just ignore the fact that
you can't see them in Word, because that's all you can't do. Word is
actually fully Unicode-capable (in fact, internally Word stores its text in
Unicode, and has done since Mac Word 98). But Mac OS X won't allow it to
display Unicode characters that are not part of the Mac character set.

If you want to *fix* the problem on the Mac, then you need to find out which
font on the Mac contains the character you want. If you can, and change the
character to that font, the character should reappear. Unfortunately, this
is likely to break the document when it goes back to the PC...

Cheers

This responds to article

Ask the author what font the symbols are. That's a key factor.

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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP: Word for Macintosh and Word for Windows
Consultant Technical Writer <[email protected]>
+61 4 1209 1410; Sydney, Australia: GMT + 10 hrs