My second post of the day; first on this question...

I'm moving data via cut and paste between some archived Word documents and a
program that merges the Word data with other data that it secures by polling
the AS/400. The merged data winds up in an Adobe pdf output file. The Word
documents themselves (the one's I'm copying) were cut and pasted years ago
from an ERP database. When that original pasting was done, the characters
(things like / * + % , and " " ) all came into Word in a format that, once
exported to the Adobe file, is unrecognizable to the Adobe reader.

I wrote a macro that works for most characters but it will not handle the
quotation marks. The macro is structured to use the Find and Replace
(Replace All). I have it look for all * and replace the * with ||| Then I
have it look for all ||| and replace them with * (typed in Word format from
my keyboard vs. imported from Lord knows what program years ago). By
replacing the "old" *'s with Word-generated *'s, the Adobe can easily read
the document. I've written the macro to cover all the symbols that occur in
the old Word files. And it works for all but 2 symbols.

That approach is not working for the " (open quotes) or the " (close
quotes). I have handled them separately, together, with fonts specified and
without. I can get the appearance to change in the Word document but when I
pull it into the program whose output is the Adobe file, the font goes to
Helvetica and the smart-quotes go back to looking like the ones in this post
" " And, the Adobe doc crashes when I try to open it up.

I'm up for suggestions!!!

Thanks