converting the font style on a typed document

[Guest]

hi. I was playing around with formatting. I selected the full text [two
pages] and changed the style from new roman to webdings. I went back to the
text a couple of days later. I 'selected all' and tried to change it back to
new roman. All i got was a text document full of identical squares. Can
anyone help me, it was an important document that i should not have used for
practice :-(

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?ZW5pZ21hNjY2?=,

I was playing around with formatting. I selected the full text [two
pages] and changed the style from new roman to webdings. I went back to the
text a couple of days later. I 'selected all' and tried to change it back to
new roman. All i got was a text document full of identical squares. Can
anyone help me, it was an important document that i should not have used for
practice :-(

A "style" in word is a named set of formatting specifications. You didn't change
the "style", just the font formatting. This in the interest of avoiding
confusion if you post a question in the future where it's not so clear what you
really did

The problem with applying a symbol type of font is that it makes fundamental
changes in the way Word stores the text. Used to be, a font could contain only
512 characters, at the most. Then they introduced Unicode, and a font can
contain tens of thousands of characters. If you mix the two, at the end Word may
not longer be able to match up the characters from the one font with the
original.

The unicode information is available in clear text if the document is saved as
HTML or XML. With a bit of work, someone should be able to figure out which
unicode matches which "plain text" and reconvert the document. But it would take
some time (= money). There might even be professionals or software out there
already to do the job. But there's not going to be any "simple" way for you to
get the text back within the Word interface.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Stefan Blom]

in message

Hi =?Utf-8?B?ZW5pZ21hNjY2?=,

I was playing around with formatting. I selected the full text [two
pages] and changed the style from new roman to webdings. I went back to the
text a couple of days later. I 'selected all' and tried to change it back to
new roman. All i got was a text document full of identical squares. Can
anyone help me, it was an important document that i should not have used for
practice :-(

A "style" in word is a named set of formatting specifications. You didn't change
the "style", just the font formatting. This in the interest of avoiding
confusion if you post a question in the future where it's not so clear what you
really did

The problem with applying a symbol type of font is that it makes fundamental
changes in the way Word stores the text. Used to be, a font could contain only
512 characters, at the most. Then they introduced Unicode, and a font can
contain tens of thousands of characters. If you mix the two, at the end Word may
not longer be able to match up the characters from the one font with the
original.

The unicode information is available in clear text if the document is saved as
HTML or XML. With a bit of work, someone should be able to figure out which
unicode matches which "plain text" and reconvert the document. But it would take
some time (= money). There might even be professionals or software out there
already to do the job. But there's not going to be any "simple" way for you to
get the text back within the Word interface.

But for a two-page document, saving as HTML and then copying and
pasting plain text (from the HTML source) into a fresh document seems
possible to do manually. Of course, it could be difficult to recreate
the formatting.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Stefan,

But for a two-page document, saving as HTML and then copying and
pasting plain text (from the HTML source) into a fresh document seems
possible to do manually.

But the characters are still encoded in the HTML document. Someone
still needs to work out which encoding matches which character in the
previous font... (I actually recreated the described steps and took a
good hard look before answering.)

Cindy Meister

 

[Guest]

Hmm... I have to admit that I did my testing in Word 2000, and it certainly
produced readable HTML code, which I could copy from NotePad. (I had to
remove tags applied to the text, of course.) I guess recent versions are
better at Unicode, and therefore make it more complicated...

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Stefan,

I have to admit that I did my testing in Word 2000, and it certainly
produced readable HTML code, which I could copy from NotePad. (I had to
remove tags applied to the text, of course.) I guess recent versions are
better at Unicode, and therefore make it more complicated...

Thanks for replying to this, because yesterday garfield-an-odie posted a
link to a KB article with a macro to "convert" the Unicode back to plain
text. I was worried whether I could find this thread again... and thanks to
you, I have!
WD2002: Symbol Characters Are Changed to Box Characters
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290978

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[Stefan Blom]

Good to know that there is a solution. I'm still a bit confused about
this, though. I tested in Word 2003 and I found that if I apply a
symbol font and then reapply a non-symbol font (or press Ctrl+SpaceBar
to revert to style), I'll get a document with boxes instead of
characters (as we've already established). Also, saving as HTML
produces a document whose HTML cannot be read (in a text editor such
as NotePad).

However, if I re-apply the symbol font (in the document with boxes
instead of characters) and then save as HTML I seem to get readable
HTML code, which can be pasted into a new document (after manually
removing the HTML/XML tags, of course). So unless I completely missed
a step, it does seem to be possible to recreate the *text* of the
document manually (though time-consuming).

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message

 

[Stefan Blom]

Of course, with "readable HTML" and similar expressions, I mean that I
can read the plain text (the contents) of the file; I am *not* saying
that the HTML tags themselves are (or aren't) readable.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message