Charlie Hewlett said:
Basically I have mistakenly saved a document in wingdings font and now can
not get it back into normal fonts - is there a way?
Wow, I just tried it and you're right: all the character information seems
to be lost. Defining text and changing the font ends up with blank boxes in
Times New Roman and with various other garbage in other fonts. I tried
copying the text into a Notepad text file and got nothing useful. I tried
copying (control-A control-C) the text to the clipboard and pasting it into
a new Word document. The Wingdings come across fine with "Keep source
formatting" but if I select the "Match destination formatting" or "Keep text
only" options I end up with blank boxes. I even tried copying individual
Wingdings and doing a global search and replace with the characters I knew
they replaced and again I got empty boxes.
It was at this point I tried a desperate measure. I copied the first box to
the clipboard, pasted it into the "Find" field in the global search and
replace dialog, and in the "Replace with" field I entered "T" (which I know
was the first letter in the text). Miraculously all the capital T's
reappeared. I tried it with the next box (which I knew was "O") and now all
the capital O's reappeared. Same with "W", "A", "R", "D", "S" etc. All the
character information is still there in other words--it's just concealed
inside those little blank boxes. (Not all of it apparently: The blank spaces
are gone.)
According to the link below you can recover the text by pasting the text
into Outlook:
http://lists.rite.ed.qut.edu.au/pipermail/oz-teachers/2004-May/001363.html
I don't have Outlook so I don't know if this works.
I'm very glad I didn't make this mistake...
Good luck.
