Corrupt XP font

[Debra]

I have a Windows XP SP2 workstation. A week ago when the user opened a .wpd
file in Word the docuement font was all wing dings even though the font was
set to Times New Roman in Normal.dot. I trouble shot this thinking it was an
Office issue. But on Friday, every time this user printed out of any
application, the printed out document was wing dings. I printed out a test
page from the print driver and it printed out fine. When whatever is being
printed out is viewed on the screen, it appears fine, but when printed, all
wing dings. I even printed to another printer and still wing dings.
Uninstalled and reinstalled driver. So I'm sure it isn't the print driver.
Could it be the Windows XP default font is corrupt? I'm at a loss here.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Debra

 

[Andrew McLaren]

I have a Windows XP SP2 workstation. A week ago when the user opened a .wpd
file in Word the docuement font was all wing dings even though the font
was
set to Times New Roman in Normal.dot. I trouble shot this thinking it was
an

Hi Debra,

I don't know the exact answer, but here are a few ideas ..

"wpd" is usually the extension for a WordPerfect file. Microsoft Word cannot
open these WordPerfect files directly; if Word's optional WordPefect
Converter feature is installed, then Word will prompt to convert the
document, and then open it. If no converter is available, Microsoft Word
will atempt to open the *.wpd file as plain ASCII text; in which case, the
WordPerfect formatting will appear as random junk, such as wingdings, empty
squares, or random characters. It sounds like this is what happened a week
ago, when the user opened the file.

Is the problem affecting *all* applications, now? Or just Microsoft Word? It
is possible that Normal.dot may have been somehow corrupted when Word opened
the WordPerfect file, in which case, any other docs which use Normal.dot may
also print out corrupted. You can isolate the problem by printing from
Notepad - run Notepad, enter some text, set the font to Times New Roman; and
then print. If this prints correctly (as I suspect it will) then there is no
problem with TIMES.TTF (the Times New Roman font file itself); the problem
will be somewhere in Microsoft Office and/or Microsoft Word.

In a GUI application like Word, Windows GDI uses the font file to help
render both the on-screen text, *and* the printed output. If the font file
*.ttf is corrupted, you'd see the problem even when printing from Notepad,
which is essentially a wrapper around the Windows Edit Control. If Notepad
prints okay, but you still see problems in Office applications, then the
problem is specific to Microsoft Office; and not to Windows itself
(including the font file). If it's an Office problem, you may want to try
one of the Office or Word groups; or investigate the Normal.dot file.

Hope this helps a bit,

Andrew