Unicode "private use" glyphs in Powerpoint and Word 2008

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Office 12.0.0.1 on Leopard 10.5.2, all updates applied to both.

A friend is migrating from Windows to Mac, and has come across
something that we're trying to work around.

He has some .ppt files with font glyphs in from a Unicode .ttf font (a
specific purpose font for showing the LCD display characters on a
piece of monitoring equipment). When we bring the font and .ppt over
to the Mac, the glyphs from the normal ASCII range come over into
Powerpoint 2008 fine, but the glyphs from the "private use" range from
F000 upwards a way don't transfer. In Powerpoint they show as spaces.

Attempting to work around this, I discovered that in a Word .doc they
come over as [x] symbols (from the font, but the wrong position), and
in an Excel .xls they come over correctly - But then can't be
copy'pasted or embedded as a table from Excel into Powerpoint.

Using Character Palette, they won't insert into Powerpoint or Word or
Excel.

(Over on the Windows box, Office 2003, the copy and paste also fails
between Office apps in curious ways)

Finally, other fonts with "private use" symbols around the F001 where
I'm looking (Times New Roman, Century Gothic, Century Schoolbook) fail
to paste in exactly the same way, which pretty much confirms that it's
not the special font that's broken, I think. In all cases the
surrounding Hangul and CJK symbols *do* succesfully
insert/cut'n'paste.

What can I do to work around this, to get those "private use" symbols
into Powerpoint 2008?

Cheers - Jaimie

 

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Office 12.0.0.1 on Leopard 10.5.2, all updates applied to both.

A friend is migrating from Windows to Mac, and has come across
something that we're trying to work around.

He has some .ppt files with font glyphs in from a Unicode .ttf font (a
specific purpose font for showing the LCD display characters on a
piece of monitoring equipment). When we bring the font and .ppt over
to the Mac, the glyphs from the normal ASCII range come over into
Powerpoint 2008 fine, but the glyphs from the "private use" range from
F000 upwards a way don't transfer. In Powerpoint they show as spaces.

I've managed a workaround. I loaded the .ppt into Apple's Keynote from
iWork'08, which displays the "private use" glyphs as all uppercase B
in a different font.

Then I replaced each B with the appropriate glyph in Keynote, and
exported the file back to .ppt. Both Keynote and Powerpoint 2008 now
load it with no problems and display the correct glyphs.

This seems to indicate that Keynote is better at writing .ppt files
than Powerpoint is...

So, there should be a bug report of some description I can feed to the
MBU - where do I do that?

Cheers - Jaimie

 

[CyberTaz]

Glad you got it sorted - Use Help> Send Feedback.

I "think" this is an issue caused by an unannounced change by Apple
involving font recognition (funny how *their* stuff works but other stuff
doesn't) If I'm right there is awareness on the part of MS & they're
working with Apple on a fix in a future update. Where it stands now I don't
know, but file the report anyway - just in case this is a different issue or
a new wrinkle in the one I'm referring to.

 

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Glad you got it sorted - Use Help> Send Feedback.

Ace - cheers!

I "think" this is an issue caused by an unannounced change by Apple
involving font recognition (funny how *their* stuff works but other stuff
doesn't)

Excel 2008 *nearly* gets it completely right. But there's certainly
some sort of MS-only trouble going on - cut'n'paste between Office
2003 apps failed in different ways depending on which app was source
and which was destination.

It'd be interesting to try this on a Tiger machine, but I don't have
any of those any more.

If I'm right there is awareness on the part of MS & they're
working with Apple on a fix in a future update. Where it stands now I don't
know, but file the report anyway - just in case this is a different issue or
a new wrinkle in the one I'm referring to.

Will do, thanks.

Cheers - Jaimie