Microsoft Word 2003

I have a client who brought a technical document to me that was acting
"strangely." It is over 500 pages, very little use of styles and lots of
direct formatting.

He doesn't know who wrote the original. He opened the original (Normal was
Times 12, all other styles looked OK), made some editing changes, and then
saved the file. However, when he opened the document the next time, many of
the styles were changed. Normal was now a font with a name that appears to
be in Chinese or Japanese characters. The heading styles are now
zapfdingbats. Sections that used to be code examples in Courier are now
formatted with Symbol.

I'm at a total loss of what has happened. I don't know if the document was
first written in Chinese or Japanese -- which accounts for the oddly named
font. I thought at first I could just reset Normal and things would be OK --
but that just resulted in other odd things happening -- like "blank
rectangles" now showing up for some characters.

Detect language automatically is not checked.
Styles are not selected to be udpated automatically.
Under Font Substitution, there is
Geneva - Arial
MS Mincho - Arial Unicode MS
Sim Sun - Arial Unicode MS
the odd named font - Aria Unicode MS

Any ideas on what has happened to this document? He was able to revert to
another version that doesn't exhibit this strange behaviour. Is there
anything we can do to keep this from happening again?

Thanks,
Rita
rhewell

Hi Rita,

I can't recall ever hearing about anything like this, before. I agree with your
analysis, that something "Asian" happened in it, but no idea what might have
caused it.

You might try asking in the word.international.features group. Someone there
might have some experience in this.

FWIW, I know Word will automatically, and quite unexpectdely, use MS Mincho for
form fields if "international support" has been installed. But the other fonts
are mysteries to me.

Microsoft Word 2003

I have a client who brought a technical document to me that was acting
"strangely." It is over 500 pages, very little use of styles and lots of
direct formatting.

He doesn't know who wrote the original. He opened the original (Normal was
Times 12, all other styles looked OK), made some editing changes, and then
saved the file. However, when he opened the document the next time, many of
the styles were changed. Normal was now a font with a name that appears to
be in Chinese or Japanese characters. The heading styles are now
zapfdingbats. Sections that used to be code examples in Courier are now
formatted with Symbol.

I'm at a total loss of what has happened. I don't know if the document was
first written in Chinese or Japanese -- which accounts for the oddly named
font. I thought at first I could just reset Normal and things would be OK --
but that just resulted in other odd things happening -- like "blank
rectangles" now showing up for some characters.

Detect language automatically is not checked.
Styles are not selected to be udpated automatically.
Under Font Substitution, there is
Geneva - Arial
MS Mincho - Arial Unicode MS
Sim Sun - Arial Unicode MS
the odd named font - Aria Unicode MS

Any ideas on what has happened to this document? He was able to revert to
another version that doesn't exhibit this strange behaviour. Is there
anything we can do to keep this from happening again?


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

FWIW, I have never knowingly enabled any kind of international features or
support for Asian languages (though I do have MS Mincho installed), but I
get MS Mincho randomly showing up when I use en and em spaces (which tend to
become converted to MS Mincho if I use ResetChar on text in which they
appear) and in some instances when I insert the prime and double-prime
Unicode characters.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote in message
news:VA.0000a8b1.006c014a@speedy...
Hi Rita,

I can't recall ever hearing about anything like this, before. I agree with
your
analysis, that something "Asian" happened in it, but no idea what might
have
caused it.

You might try asking in the word.international.features group. Someone
there
might have some experience in this.

FWIW, I know Word will automatically, and quite unexpectdely, use MS
Mincho for
form fields if "international support" has been installed. But the other
fonts
are mysteries to me.

Microsoft Word 2003

I have a client who brought a technical document to me that was acting
"strangely." It is over 500 pages, very little use of styles and lots
of
direct formatting.

He doesn't know who wrote the original. He opened the original (Normal
was
Times 12, all other styles looked OK), made some editing changes, and
then
saved the file. However, when he opened the document the next time,
many of
the styles were changed. Normal was now a font with a name that appears
to
be in Chinese or Japanese characters. The heading styles are now
zapfdingbats. Sections that used to be code examples in Courier are now
formatted with Symbol.

I'm at a total loss of what has happened. I don't know if the document
was
first written in Chinese or Japanese -- which accounts for the oddly
named
font. I thought at first I could just reset Normal and things would be
OK --
but that just resulted in other odd things happening -- like "blank
rectangles" now showing up for some characters.

Detect language automatically is not checked.
Styles are not selected to be udpated automatically.
Under Font Substitution, there is
Geneva - Arial
MS Mincho - Arial Unicode MS
Sim Sun - Arial Unicode MS
the odd named font - Aria Unicode MS

Any ideas on what has happened to this document? He was able to revert
to
another version that doesn't exhibit this strange behaviour. Is there
anything we can do to keep this from happening again?


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

[MSWordGuy]

I know this is an old post, but I experienced the same thing an thought I'd add my two sense and how it might be possible to fix it.

First of all, MS (anything) handles CJK fonts and encoding pretty bad. One thing I noticed is that now most Japanese test reverts to Simsum with an encoding of CHINESE_GB2312. It should actually be a Japanese font, such as MS Gothic, and have a western encoding. Surely it should be UTF-8, but we can't expect MS to have a clue about widely used international standards.

Some documents I'm trying to rescue are only rescueable by directly editing the file in a plain text editor. If your file is RTF, this is not too difficult. If it's in MS Word, you may be out of luck. Of course you could always try opening it in another editor such as OpenOffice (Gasp!), then save it as another sane format such as HTML or something that you can copy and paste the rendered text from into a plain text document to remove all formating. Then copy again the plain text into your favorite editor and format to your liking - hopefuly with styles, etc.

God speed!