For reasons unknown, WordPerfect continued to use its own font for "curly"
quotes and apostrophes, en and em dashes, and some other symbols long after
most other Windows programs (such as Word) were taking advantage of the
availability of these characters in most fonts. Consequently, when you open
in Word a document created in WP, you will see either a bunch of = and @ and
other such odd symbols or the quote, apostrophe, and dash characters you
expect to see, though they may look a little "different" since they will be
the same regardless of what font you're using.
If the documents will be used only in-house, and everybody has the needed
font installed, there's no urgency about "fixing" this problem, but if
documents will be sent out to others who may not have the font installed,
you'll be best advised to correct it. You may find it helpful to move the
font out of the Windows Fonts folder temporarily just to make it more
obvious what needs to be replaced.
I've had success using Find and Replace to replace the WP Typographic
Symbols characters (though this will be less successful if your document
actually includes = and @ characters). If you type ' or " into the "Replace
with" box, Word will helpfully AutoFormat the character for you, so you
don't have to worry about using the specific quote character needed, but do
be on the lookout for places where (as when typing in Word) you get an
opening single quote where an apostrophe is called for. For the en and em
dashes (if any), you can use ^= and ^+ (respectively) in the "Replace with"
box.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
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