Word en dashes

[James]

Hi all,

Here's an interesting problem I hope someone can answer...

We're running Office 2004 Mac. We get Word 2000 documents. When we
open them open these docs up, all formatting is correct except one
thing: en dashes. — become totally invisible. (I say invisible because
I can highlight the area where they are suppose to be, copy, go to
Find and Replace, Paste, and the — will paste in fine). Importing a
Word 2000 doc into InDesign will convert the — into a square box and
highlight it as if the font were missing. I've tried everything I can
think of... anyone have a clue what could be going on here?

Thanks!

 

[John McGhie]

Hi James:

The font *is* missing Run this Macro in Word 2000 to see what it is
that they're actually sending:

Sub main()
'
' Charcode Macro
' Macro written 8/06/00 by John McGhie
'
CharNum = AscW(Selection.Text)
CharFont = Selection.Font.Name

MsgBox CharFont & " font and character number " & Str(CharNum)

End Sub

Note: The macro will run in Word 2004, but results are not guaranteed
because Mac Word VBA does not support Unicode. See "Asc Function" in the
VBA Help for more.

Cheers

Hi all,

Here's an interesting problem I hope someone can answer...

We're running Office 2004 Mac. We get Word 2000 documents. When we
open them open these docs up, all formatting is correct except one
thing: en dashes. — become totally invisible. (I say invisible because
I can highlight the area where they are suppose to be, copy, go to
Find and Replace, Paste, and the — will paste in fine). Importing a
Word 2000 doc into InDesign will convert the — into a square box and
highlight it as if the font were missing. I've tried everything I can
think of... anyone have a clue what could be going on here?

Thanks!

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[James]

John,

Thanks for replying. I ran this macro on Word 2000 and got "Timesfont
character 8213." Word 2004 shows "Times font character 32." There is
obviously a difference... but I'm not sure how to fix? I've gone so
far as to take all of their WIN fonts and put them on my Mac... same
thing happens... any idea how I can get these fonts working together?

James

 

[John McGhie]

Hi James:

Sorry: That macro is not reliable on the Mac, Mac Word does not support the
CharW function it needs. The value it is returning, "32" is a "space" which
in this case is a VBA euphemism for "damned if I know"...

Hmmm... In my copy of Word 2004, that macro returns 8211 from both Arial
and Times for an en-dash, which turns out to be exactly correct.

Ahhhhhh....!!!! The light slowly dawns....


Character 8213 is in fact a "non-breaking hyphen". Which in turn is not a
"real" character, it's a typesetting "command". I suspect the macro is
getting confused because the character for a non-breaking hyphen will be
substituted on the way to the printer for an en-dash, which is the same
width.

I hope Alan Wood will be along in a moment to explain it all to both of us


On the PC, the macro returns character 30 for the character non-breaking
hyphen. So I think the non--breaking function is confusing things.

Cheers

John,

Thanks for replying. I ran this macro on Word 2000 and got "Timesfont
character 8213." Word 2004 shows "Times font character 32." There is
obviously a difference... but I'm not sure how to fix? I've gone so
far as to take all of their WIN fonts and put them on my Mac... same
thing happens... any idea how I can get these fonts working together?

James

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi James:

Sorry: That macro is not reliable on the Mac, Mac Word does not support the
CharW function it needs. The value it is returning, "32" is a "space" which
in this case is a VBA euphemism for "damned if I know"...

Hmmm... In my copy of Word 2004, that macro returns 8211 from both Arial
and Times for an en-dash, which turns out to be exactly correct.

Ahhhhhh....!!!! The light slowly dawns....


Character 8213 is in fact a "non-breaking hyphen". Which in turn is not a
"real" character, it's a typesetting "command". I suspect the macro is
getting confused because the character for a non-breaking hyphen will be
substituted on the way to the printer for an en-dash, which is the same
width.

I hope Alan Wood will be along in a moment to explain it all to both of us


On the PC, the macro returns character 30 for the character non-breaking
hyphen. So I think the non--breaking function is confusing things.

Cheers

 

[Klaus Linke]

Character 8213 is in fact a "non-breaking hyphen". [...]
On the PC, the macro returns character 30 for the character non-breaking
hyphen. So I think the non--breaking function is confusing things.

Not sure about that: 8213 would be a quotation dash.
I've never encountered it on the PC version.

8211 (U+2011) is a non-breaking hyphen.

And that's really bugger since MS still uses the control character ASCII 30
if you save as plain text or Unicode text.
Until MS decides to change that to some sensible Unicode character (8209 =
U+2011 = "non-breaking hyphen" or whatever), it's an accident waiting to
happen.

I recently spent several days fixing documents where the non-breaking
hyphen got lost completely in conversion to XML.

Regards,
Klaus