Unicode Conversion Formatting Issue

February 22, 2007 8:19 PM

Unicode Filter: Converting an Office 98 document to Unicode has caused formatting problems.

I can do a find and replace ok for the characters, but when I switch the font to Unicode the spacing around the Unicode characters goes haywire with gaps. Microsoft suggests using a Word Add-In called the "broken fonts add-in" that supposedly comes with Office 2003, but I am unable to find that on my Office 2003 disk. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

posted by AArtaud to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: Oh, and I'm using Arial Unicode MS, but TITUS Cyberbit Basic, another Unicode font, works fine.
posted by AArtaud at 8:48 PM on February 22, 2007

I'm pretty sure the broken font add-in comes with Office XP, not Office 2003.
posted by saraswati at 9:06 PM on February 22, 2007

If another font works fine, it's not a Unicode problem, it's a font problem. Unicode is a character encoding, a system of converting numbers to and from characters. A font is a system of converting characters to shapes. Different fonts have shapes for different characters, and a "Unicode font" has shapes for many unicode characters. But there are a lot of Unicode characters, and most "Unicode fonts" don't actually have shapes for them all. When a font doesn't have a shape for a given character, generaly another font is used for that character. Sometimes these fallback fonts don't work very well with the primary font, and it sounds like this is what you are seeing.
posted by scottreynen at 9:10 PM on February 22, 2007

Response by poster: Funnily enough, cutting and pasting the whole thing in a new document solved the problem. Thanks for the advice.
posted by AArtaud at 10:08 PM on February 22, 2007