Hi.



Just recently, my laptop began experiencing serious main-board problems, and I've had to transfer my work to a desktop computer. I used MS Office 2003 on my laptop, but the desktop has Office 2007. Both computers have the same OS, i.e., Windows XP.

Throughout my documents, I have used a special font 'Times Norman' which has the complete range of diacritical marks/symbols I need for transliterated terms from other languages.

I created shortcuts through the 'Insert Symbols' function of Word for each of the relevant symbols, and inserted them individually into my main text using the shortcuts. The font of the main text is almost always 'Times New Roman'. So these 'Times Norman' font symbols are interspersed throughout the 'Times New Roman' text of my documents.

I installed 'Times Norman' into the font folder of the new computer, and I have also created exactly the same shortcuts for each symbol. The font 'Times Norman' is definitely installed into the fonts folder, and works fine when I insert it into a new text using my newly-assigned shortcuts.

However, now that I've transferred all my previously written material to the other computer, all of the previously inserted symbols appear as blank 'rectangles'. I have thousands of documents, and throughout these documents, these symbols may occur from between a few times to hundreds of times. It is a practical impossibility to re-write the symbols contained in all of these documents again. In fact, I have already had to do this to a large extent some time ago, when I changed from a Mac to a PC. It has been a gradual process that has taken me years. But now, at this late stage, I have a Ph.D. thesis that needs to be finished within the next few months. . . So this really is quite a troublesome little issue. . .

One would think that there must be some more or less simple and practical solution to this problem, so that the original symbols become readable and printable again in my documents. I certainly hope there is.

Can anyone help out with this?

Many thanks.

Hi. It's okay, I've just discovered the easy solution.

Microsoft Office Button > Word Options > Advanced > Font Substitution
Word 2007 was 'misrecognising' the the TTF 'Times Norman' by its original older name 'Normyn' (1997) and was trying to substitute another font which did not have any symbols assigned to the relevant character codes.
It was one easy step to select 'Times Norman' as the substitution font and mirabile dictu: the document looks just how it should, again.
Thought there must be some sensible, simple answer. . . Relief.
Peace to all!

I'm glad you posted that--and that you figured it out. Before seeing the answer, I was not certain of an easy solution. I have sent the link to DTP colleagues at work.

Cheers!