KB184634 - WD98: Symbol Characters Change to Underline Characters

Article ID: 184634

Article Last Modified on 6/17/2005

Microsoft Word 98 for Macintosh

This article was previously published under Q184634

For a Microsoft Word 2002 version of this article, see 290978.

SYMPTOMS

When you format text with a symbol font, such as Wingdings, and then change to a non-symbol font such as Times New Roman, the text is replaced with underline characters.

CAUSE

Word displays the underline characters after it translates the symbol font to its Unicode equivalent.

This problem occurs when you do the following:

Apply a font format using a symbol font, such as Wingdings.
Type some text.
Select the text from step 2 and apply a non-symbol font, such as Times New Roman.

WORKAROUND

Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied. This includes, but is not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This article assumes that you are familiar with the programming language that is being demonstrated and with the tools that are used to create and to debug procedures. Microsoft support engineers can help explain the functionality of a particular procedure, but they will not modify these examples to provide added functionality or construct procedures to meet your specific requirements. The following Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications macro converts the symbol characters to non-symbol characters:

NOTES: Select the underline characters before you run the following macro. In the Font dialog box that appears, select a non-Symbol font. For example, Times or Times New Roman.

   Sub ConvertSymbol()

      Dim dlgFont As Dialog
      With Selection
         ' Check for valid text selection.
         ' (There must be a selection and
         '  the selection must be text only.)
         If .Type = wdNoSelection Or .Type <> wdSelectionNormal Then
            MsgBox "You must select some text to convert."
            Exit Sub
         End If

         ' Display the font dialog box to select a non-symbol font.
         Set dlgFont = Dialogs(wdDialogFormatFont)
         If dlgFont.Display Then
            .Cut
            .Font.Name = dlgFont.Font
            .PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
         End If
      End With

   End Sub

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

The following table lists some common symbol and non-symbol fonts.

    Symbol Fonts                Non-Symbol Fonts
   --------------------------------------------

   Monotype Sorts              Arial
   Symbol                      Chicago
   Wingdings                   Courier New
                               Times New Roman

Unicode

Unicode is a 16-bit character set designed to cover all the world's major living languages in addition to scientific symbols and dead languages that are the subject of scholarly interest. It eliminates the complexity of multi-byte character sets that are currently used on UNIX and Windows to support Asian languages. A consortium of companies including Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Digital, and IBM created Unicode. These companies used information from the ISO-10646 standard to produce a single standard in 1993. Unicode is the basis for the Windows NT operating system.

Unicode is a 16-bit character set where all characters occupy the same space. The first 256 values are the same as the ISO-Latin character set, which is also the basis for the ANSI character set used in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. However, Unicode defines 34,168 distinct coded characters. In most character sets a single value is often assigned to several characters. For example, in ASCII a "-" is used to represent a hyphen, a minus sign, a dash, and a non-breaking hyphen. In Unicode, each meaning is given its own code; that is, a hyphen is represented by a character different from a minus sign, and so forth. The Unicode standard contains only one instance of each character and assigns it a unique name and code value. It also supports "combining" accent characters, which follow the base character that they are to modify.

For more information about Unicode, visit the Unicode Web site at:

http://www.unicode.org/

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

181058 OFF98: How to Run Sample Code from Knowledge Base Articles

REFERENCES

For more information about getting help with Visual Basic for Applications, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

163435 VBA: Programming Resources for Visual Basic for Applications

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