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Old 07-13-2010, 11:10 AM
fitchkd25 fitchkd25 is offline Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected Windows XP Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected Office 2007
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Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected
 
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Thumbs down Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected

Hello,



Our users are experiencing a very discouraging issue in regards to how MS Word (in Windows) handles non-unicode characters. This issue is confirmed in both Word 2007 and the Word 2010 Beta using Windows XP SP3; I suspect it works the same way in 2003.

Issue:
1) A user creates a document using a non-unicode font, entering characters to represent scientific notations. For example, he enters a Mu (µ). Note: I pasted in a unicode-compliant Mu for reference.
2) The user opens his document and attempts to copy / paste this non-unicode character representing a Mu into a web browser for entry into our system. It pastes as an unrecognized character. This is expected.
3) The user opens his document, selects the non-unicode character and adjusts its font to "Arial Unicode MS," saving the document. He closes / re-opens the document for good measure. Once re-opened, he copies what should be a unicode Mu and pastes it into the web browser. It is still represented as an unrecognized character.
4) The user creates a new document, sets the font to "Arial Unciode MS" and creates a Mu. He copies this Mu into the web browser and it pastes over in Unicode, as expected.

Conclusion:
Word is not actually converting non-unicode characters into unicode characters when it should, when a unicode font is selected. Instead, it is taking a best-guess for display reasons but doing no actual conversion.

How do I overcome this problem?
* Can I change some setting in Word to force a conversion? Preferable.
* Is there a "cleaner" app or Word macro that will do this?
* Other solutions?

Additional Notes:
* Re-typing the affected documents using unicode is not an option
* This is not an issue in Mac OS X using the most recent version of Word. A sample case such as in (3) results in a unicode Mu being pasted into the browser.

Please help!
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Old 08-17-2012, 12:24 AM
ErwinT ErwinT is offline Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected Windows XP Word Doesn't Convert Non-Unicode Characters As Expected Office 2007
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I'm not sure if converting upon selection of another font would actually be desirable. If you would select the original font back you would get gibberish. Unless Word would re-convert the Unicode char back into whatever similar character the selected font would offer, and that is of course prone to errors.

Word used to rely heavily on things like the symbol font to create out-of-ASCII characters. IE still supports this. I would not like Word to think for me and convert things automatically, it does that far too often already.

I do agree though that it is desirable to, at some point, convert all non-Unicode characters to Unicode. In a deliberate action, not an automatic one.

One thing you could try is a find-and-replace action. Using the styles list, you can select all text sections with a specific formatting (for example: normal + font:symbol). Go to the fist one, and find-and-replace that character/text section with the desired Unicode equivalent in the entire document. Repeat until no text in that font exists anymore.

It takes a bit of effort, but certainly not as much as retyping the whole document.

Alternatively, save to HTML and search-and-replace with a text replace tool such as text crawler.
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