Apostrophes replaced with =

[Brenda from Michigan]

Word 2002 SP3

One person opens a locked document and every apostrophe is replaced with an
equals sign. I can't find any setting that seems to work with this problem.
Text is is regular Ariel typeface. On my PC as well as several other people,
this same document opens just fine. Any hints on what I should look for?
Thanks!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The usual reason for this is that the document, eons ago, originated in
WordPerfect, and the apostrophes, quotes, and dashes were inserted as
special characters in the WP Typographic Symbols font. Everything is fine as
long as you have that font installed; although these characters are in a
different font from the rest of the text, you might not notice it,
especially onscreen (though the WP versions are pretty ugly--and of course
the same for all fonts), but if you move the document to a machine that
doesn't have this font installed, then the corresponding character in the
default paragraph font (in this case, Arial) will be substituted, and you
will get equals signs, accented A's, and the like. About the only thing you
can do at this point is use Replace to replace them with the correct
characters.

 

[Don]

=?Utf-8?B?QnJlbmRhIGZyb20gTWljaGlnYW4=?=

Word 2002 SP3

One person opens a locked document and every apostrophe is replaced
with an equals sign. I can't find any setting that seems to work with
this problem. Text is is regular Ariel typeface. On my PC as well as
several other people, this same document opens just fine. Any hints
on what I should look for? Thanks!

I do lots of scanning into NotePad and then saving the documents as RTF.
Later, when converting the RTF's back into a web page (text), characters
(such as hypens and em-dashes) are lost being converted to question marks.

Corrections require two run-throughs of manual editing.

 

[grammatim]

=?Utf-8?B?QnJlbmRhIGZyb20gTWljaGlnYW4=?=



I do lots of scanning into NotePad and then saving the documents as RTF.
Later, when converting the RTF's back into a web page (text), characters
(such as hypens and em-dashes) are lost being converted to question marks.

Corrections require two run-throughs of manual editing.

Sounds like maybe you need a better scanner or more sensitive OCR.
Hyphens and dashes (they probably all render dashes as hyphens)
shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Brenda from Michigan]

Thanks for the response. My first question to the user was, "Was this
document originally created in WordPerfect and then converted into Word?"
The answer was no. At any rate, the document is a locked form and the user
cannot make the necessary changes. I have received an unlocked version of
this form. I will change all the apostrophes and send it back to the user
with the problem and see what happens. Thanks for the thoughts!
--
Brenda

The usual reason for this is that the document, eons ago, originated in
WordPerfect, and the apostrophes, quotes, and dashes were inserted as
special characters in the WP Typographic Symbols font. Everything is fine as
long as you have that font installed; although these characters are in a
different font from the rest of the text, you might not notice it,
especially onscreen (though the WP versions are pretty ugly--and of course
the same for all fonts), but if you move the document to a machine that
doesn't have this font installed, then the corresponding character in the
default paragraph font (in this case, Arial) will be substituted, and you
will get equals signs, accented A's, and the like. About the only thing you
can do at this point is use Replace to replace them with the correct
characters.

 

[Don]

Sounds like maybe you need a better scanner or more sensitive OCR.
Hyphens and dashes (they probably all render dashes as hyphens)
shouldn't be a problem.

This is not a scanner issue.

The key to scanners and scanning is the OCR software and the users
addition of a focused supplemental dictionary.