Accents not appearing in Word

[kraakenn]

Some of our Word documents occasionally make French accents in SmallCaps disappear.



As seen in the images attached, the proper è is in the xml code but doesn't appear in the Word doc. I mean, the character is physically there in Word but does not appear as that character. A workaround for this is to remove the formatting and reapply the style *Presto* all fixed. The text appears as expected in Word.

The actual problem is the disappearing act, the text may be fine when one person is working on it but then gone when someone goes to work on it later.

I experienced something like this once before. When a single user would open a document on his machine it would be fine (with accents) until he pressed a key (any key) and the accents in small caps would magically disappear. It would only happen on his and one other user's machine, not on mine or everyone else's. I don't have that kind of evidence this time, only the fact that they are gone and these are much more important documents than the first time.

I appreciate any help you can provide.

K

[macropod]

Hi kraaken,

If the issues occur on only particular PCs, it could be a problem with the Word installation and/or fonts, or even the display driver, on those PCs. If the document prints correctly of the affected PCs, then it's most likely just a display driver issue. If the problem occurs on any PC the document is opened on, the document ma have some corruption.

[kraakenn]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the quick response.

Re: Word Installation - All of our PC's are images and are exact copies of each other, they all receive the same fonts. Though the user can change settings once they receive the PC. The first instance when it happened, William was logged in and it would happen every time he tried it but when I logged in to his PC it would not happen for me. So, it could be a setting that they changed but I have no idea as to what as I set most of their settings through macros and control their Normal.dot.

Re: Display driver - I really don't think it would have to do with this as again they are images but it also prints the "no accent" text.

This time I don't know who's pc did it since the documents got passed around a lot and we're not sure at what point the accents were lost.

Thanks for the help.

[macropod]

Hi kraaken,

In that case, it's either something to do with the user's profile (a Sys Admin issue) or some Word setting or corrupted template/addin attached to the user's account.

[kraakenn]

Thanks for the help macropod

There is also the issue that although someone's pc/account may have caused it, the text without the accent appears when opened anywhere else.

Thread is still open if anyone else has a suggestion.

[macropod]

Hi kraakenn,

In that case, the document may have become corrupted, as suggested in an earlier post. A possible fix in such a case is to insert a new last paragraph at the end of the document, copy everything except that new last paragraph to a new document, then close the corrupt document nd save the new one over it. Another approach is to save the document in RTF format, close & re-open it and re-save it in the doc format.

[kraakenn]

I tried all of those things macropod but none of them worked.

Kraakenn

[macropod]

Hi kraakenn,

Go to Tools|Options|Edit and check the 'Allow accented uppercase in French' setting. I should have thought of this earlier (but it's not something I've ever needed to consider).

[kraakenn]

That did work. Although technically it shouldn't but it solves the problem enough to move on.

Thanks

[macropod]

Hi kraakenn,

That's precisely what that setting is for. I am curious, though, as to how the problem might have propagated from one PC to the next since that setting does not travel with the document or, AFAIK, specific PCs on multi-user systems. For multiple users to be progressively affected, the implication is that the setting was changed by someone with access to their accounts.

[kraakenn]

There was one main person working on the documents and he had his "Enforce accents" checked on so he never noticed it. "Enforce Accents" is stored in the profile. When other users opened the documents and didn't have it checked they would not see the accents so that is why it appeared to propagate.

"Enforce Accented Uppercase in French" should not work but it does. The purpose of this feature is to mark uppercase accented characters as a spelling error when turned on and ignore uppercase accents when turned off. The "small caps" characters that were the problem should not even fall under this feature since they are not uppercase characters but lowercase that appear as small caps.

My theory is that the EAUiF prompts Word to go looking for uppercase accented characters and when it comes across the small caps it resets the character to it's proper form. So, the bug is still there but EAUiF gives some relief as a byproduct of it's process. But...if you turn EAUiF off it goes back to it's original state, which is not correct.