Unreadable Characters (MS Office 2000 SR-1)

[kross]

Sometimes while working in a work document I will get characters that look like rectangles or small boxes suddenly appear where legible characters once were. If I change the font sometimes the unreadable characters disappear. It doesn't seem to happen in documents that I spend little time in. I have uninstalled Office, ran eraser2k and reinstalled Office with the same results. Some hav esuggested the presence of a virus but I am running the latest version of NAVCE with the latest definitions.

[Gary Frieder]

We (the firm where I work) have gotten this problem occasionally since moving to Word 2000 and haven't yet been able to track down the origin. One thing that reduced the incidence was to ensure that the users do not have 'Allow fast saves' enabled (Tools > Options > Save tab).

Gary

[Klaus Linke]

There are also some cases when you always will get boxes. For example if you type some characters in a "decorative" font like "Symbol" or "Wingdings", then save, and later change the font to some regular font like "Arial" or "Times New Roman".

And if you import some text files with funny Carriage Return/Line Feed combinations at the end of the line, you sometimes get square boxes (really ASCII 10) right before the paragraph mark.

The boxes can also appear if you have some exotic (cyrillic, greek...) characters and change to some old font that doesn't contain those characters. Most of Word2000's fonts are WGL4-fonts, and contain at least 650, usually about 1300 different characters. Old fonts contain only about 200 characters. Usually Word will try to keep boxes from appearing by substituting a font that contains the characters, or from keeping you from changing the font, but sometimes that doesn't work (sometimes Word doesn't allow you to change the font though the font would contain the characters, or Word changes the font though the font doesn't contain the characters, resulting in boxes).

<img src=/S/cheers.gif border=0 alt=cheers width=30 height=16>Klaus