Find and Replace unwanted symbol

[Uddhava]

Dear all,

I copied some text from a pdf document to Word 2007. but some text has come
out a bit garbled. For example instead of fi, I get this strange symbol (see
attached pic).
http://tinyurl.com/ylzgbjn


So of course I want to find and replace this symbol with 'fi'. If I copy
this symbol I can paste it elsewhere in my Word document. However if I copy
and paste this symbol into the 'Find and Replace' box it just comes out as a
blank space and will then replaces all blank spaces, which of course is not
what I want. Also if I paste this symbol into this text box where I am typing
now it also comes out as a blank space.

So is there any way to Find and Replace this symbol? (By the way I have had
the same problem before with various different symbols. )

Thank you

 

[Uddhava]

If I could I would upload the two sentences (in the picture above) in
original MS Word format somewhere so anyone interested could look at it. Does
anyone know how I can do this?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Select the symbol in question and press Alt+X. What is the result? The
number you get is the Unicode number for the character in question. Also,
does the font you are using contain character F001 (the fi ligature)?
Calibri and Cambria, the two default fonts in Word 2007, do not, whereas
Times New Roman and Arial do.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Uddhava]

Dear Suzanne,

Thanks for your help. When I select the letter d and then alt+x, the d is
replaced with 0064. but when I do the same with this symbol, there is no
change, the symbol remains.

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

That suggests it's gotten converted to a Symbol font character, and
those don't have Unicode codes.

Can you go back to the program in which the document was created, and
Find/Replace all the fi characters to the f i sequence? (Does the same
thing happen with fl and ff?)

 

[Uddhava]

Dear Peter,

Thanks for your help. In my word document most or all apostrophes are also
replaced by the same symbol above, while FL is replaced by the same symbol
except upside down ie pointing upwards, and FF is rendered correctly. The
text comes from a PDF which I did not create. The main font in this pdf is
Baskerville MT and when I paste the text into MS Word the Word font says
'Baskerville MT'. However Baskerville MT does not appear in Word's list of
fonts (the closest is Baskerville Old Face). So maybe I need to install
Baskerville MT to MS Word. Otherwise I could try to change the font on the
PDF document (using Adobe Acrobat etc) before copying it to Word.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Word doesn't automatically do the f- ligature substitutions, so it may
be that your Baskerville font doesn't include the ligatures at all.
(The sample you posted clearly isn't in any form of Baskerville.) Have
you tried changing the font overall in your Word document (to
something standard like Times New Roman)?

Somewhere in your Options (you seem not to have said what version of
Word you have) you will find something called "Font Substititution."
It will tell you what font Word is using when it encounters a font not
installed on your computer. (The original name still shows up, but the
characters come from the substitute font.)

If the font doesn't have curly-quotes, it may be a free imitation of a
real font.

Or, the original document may have been created in WordPerfect, which
has its own private fonts that (still!) don't use Unicode encoding,
and you'll only be able to convert its "mistakes" one by one.