Strange characters in Word

[jburton]

I have two machines sitting side by side .. each running Windows XP Pro
(SP2) and Office XP Small Business (SP3). Let's call one machine "K"
and the other "T". When the word processing person on "K" pulls up a
WORD document that was, in years gone by a WordPerfect document, that
includes an apsotrophe (') or open quote (") or close quote (") she
sees them just fine. However when the same document is opened on
machine "T" she'll see an equals sign for the apostropy (=), and
symbols for both the open and closing quotes. They're always the same
symbols, not random.

I have checked the versions of Windows XP, Word XP and the fonts.
They're all the same.

What might I be missing?? And is there a tool I could use that would
blast thru a collection of documents fixing this feature???

Thanks!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Machine K has the WP Typographic Symbols font installed; machine T does not.
You can use Find and Replace to replace the incorrect symbols with the
correct ones (I routinely have to do this for WP documents submitted to the
short-story anthologies I edit).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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[jburton]

Thanks Suzanne...

I'll poke around that machine after 5pm .. looking for "WP Typographic
Symbols"... However, it seems that Google has not been my friend in
this chase since so far "find and replace" has been the most widely
mentioned cure..

I hope I wrong but .. well I'll accept it.

BTW... What if I installed WP on the "T" machine? Would that fix
things in the short run? I know that at some point they're going to
have to go thru and edit these documents into the correct format
manually...

Thank you again!

--==jb==--

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You could install the missing font on the computer that doesn't have it, but
this just postpones the problem because if the document is sent to someone
outside the firm who doesn't have the font, the characters will not display
correctly. Not to mention that the characters from that font are the same
regardless of what font you're using in Word (and not very attractive,
either, IMO); you'd do much better to replace with the proper ASCII
characters in the font in use.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.