Odd Spelling Behavior

[Bob Stringer]

I don't know whether this is an Adobe Acrobat problem or a
Word problem, so I'm trying here first.

I have Word 2000 SP3, running on WinXP.

I receive a news letter (WordTips) ) in .pdf format, and I
occasionally use Acrobat to convert it to rtf, and then use
Word to convert to doc.

When I used Acrobat version 5 to do the initial conversion,
most (all?) of the words which contained the letters "fi"
appeared with a period instead. For example, "file" appeared
as ".il" and I'd have to do a find and replace to correct
such words (and *boy* are there a lot of words that contain
"fi"!). That obviously was an Acrobat problem, which I
mention only by way of background.

I recently upgraded to Acrobat 6. The conversions now look
fine. However, Word, using the usual squiggly red underline,
shows all words that contain "fi" as misspelled. I'm
wondering what's going on here. Each "fi" *looks* like an
normal "fi", but Word obviously thinks otherwise. In fact,
if I do a search and replace by copying and pasting the
offending words into both the "find what" and "replace with"
boxes, Word still shows the words as misspelled. And if I
*type* the offending word into both the "find what" and
"replace with" boxes, Word reports that it didn't find such
a word. The only way to get search and replace to work,
therefore, is to copy the offending word in the "find what"
box and type it into the "replace with" box.

Another odd behavior: if I copy a "misspelled" word from
Word and paste it into a text editor, the "fi" is pasted as
a question mark. Thus, if I copy "file" in Word, in pastes
into the text editor as "?le".

Any idea what's going on here? For example, is Word for
some reason treating the offending fi's as graphics rather
than text? I'm baffled.

Thanks.

 

[Vagabond Software]

LOL! Now THAT is an obscure problem!

I don't have Adobe Writer, but you may want to hunt through Document and
Preferences menus to make sure things like "Use local Font" are checked and
proper language settings are selected.

I suspect this *could* be a globalization problem. You could be viewing a
combination of invariant unicode characters and localized culture characters
in your Word document.

In a way, you have already tested this theory to some degree. The fact that
a word search will not find "file" if you type it into the search box, but
it will find "file" if you copy and paste "fi" into the search box and then
type "le".

Another thing you could do from within Word is go to Tools-Options and click
the Font Substitution button on the Compatibility tab. If Word declares
that all fonts are available, then that can be eliminated as an issue.

The Tools menu in Word should also have a Language option that you may want
to play around with to try some things out.

I know it is a bit of troubleshooting, but it just might narrow down the
problem.

- carl

 

[PA Bear]

I'd post to a Word-specific newsgroup like

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.word.spelling.grammar or

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.word.newusers
--
HTH - Please Reply to This Thread

~Robear Dyer (PA Bear)
MS MVP-Windows (IE/OE), AH-VSOP

AumHa Forums
http://forum.aumha.org

Community Solutions Content Program for Microsoft Knowledge Base
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3337441

MVPs: Agents of the Matrix
http://msmobiles.com/news.php/2415.html

Bill Gates Admits Windows Is A Failure, OSX Is Superior
http://snipurl.com/5lre (01 Apr-04)

 

[Bob Stringer]

[snip]

Another thing you could do from within Word is go to Tools-Options and click
the Font Substitution button on the Compatibility tab. If Word declares
that all fonts are available, then that can be eliminated as an issue.

I just realized I posted this to the wrong group. I
regularly subscribe to this one and Word.Newusers, and
accidentally picked the wrong one.

But since you were good enough to respond, I have a
follow-up question. I hit the Font Substitution button as
you suggested, and it shows 3 missing fonts -- Courier PS,
Courier PSMT and Helvetica. For each one the "substituted
font" is shown as "default." But it's not clear to me what
to do with this information. For example, I changed
"default" to something like Courier New, but all it did was
change the fonts in which the document was formatted. It
didn't get rid of the odd "fi" problem.

Could you lead me a little further on your suggestion?

Thanks very much.

 

[Bob Stringer]

I'd post to a Word-specific newsgroup like

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.word.spelling.grammar or

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.word.newusers

Oops. That's what I meant to do.

Sorry. Heading over there right now.

 

[Bob Stringer]

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004 10:11:09 -0700, Bob Stringer

I got my answer from the Word.Newusers group. I'm posting it
here, for whoever may have read the question and had his
interest perked:

What you're seeing in the document as two-letter combinations
"fi" and "fl" are really single characters called "ligatures".
These characters are present in some fonts and not in others.
When they are present, they have Unicode values FB01 and FB02,
respectively. You can find them in the Insert > Symbol dialog.

 

[PA Bear]

Thanks for posting back, Bob. 'Inquiring minds' and all that.