Word PC documents to Word Mac X

[GregP]

I get a lot of emailed technical documents (biology). Most of them
cause me no problems, but in some all or most of the Greek letters
(betas, alphas, gammas and so on) do not display and are replaced by an
underscore. Sometimes I can open these in TextEdit, and they will
display, sometimes not. I don't know how the authors are inserting
these Greek letters. If I select one of the underscores and change the
font (typically Times) to Symbol, that does not work. If I open the
documents on my son's PC the proper Greek letters display. Does
anybody have an explanation and a solution for this? Thanks.

 

[dfritzin]

I get a lot of emailed technical documents (biology). Most of them
cause me no problems, but in some all or most of the Greek letters
(betas, alphas, gammas and so on) do not display and are replaced by an
underscore. Sometimes I can open these in TextEdit, and they will
display, sometimes not. I don't know how the authors are inserting
these Greek letters. If I select one of the underscores and change the
font (typically Times) to Symbol, that does not work. If I open the
documents on my son's PC the proper Greek letters display. Does
anybody have an explanation and a solution for this? Thanks.

Word for the PC displays symbols in a different manner than the Mac. On
the mac, you can get many Greek letters by using the option key. On
PCs, the author has to go to the symbol pallette. The two methods do
not always map correctly. I'm not sure if this discrepency is corrected
in Word 2004, but I know it was a problem with WordX.

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Word v.X does not display Unicode symbols.

Word 2004 does.

 

[Clive Huggan]

So the solution may well be to upgrade to Word 2004 (depending on the fonts
used in these documents). Word 2004 displays Unicode symbols, although the
range is smaller than on the PC.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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