not English characters (ă, ţ, ş) show up as squares on others computers (ms word)

Question

I'm using Windows 7 Basic and Microsoft Office 2007 and I write word documents using not English characters (ă, ţ, ş).
When I give them to other people, these special characters show up as squares. Anybody knows why, is there a fix for this ?

Answer 1

This problem might related to font encoding. See this Microsoft article how to save and open files: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HP052584541033.aspx

This might give you some additional info: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101212491033.aspx

Answer 2

The font you used is not installed on their computer. Or it is a different version of the same font that doesn't have a complete complete character map. Simplest solution? Pick a standard font that does have all the characters, or give them the font you are using. Watch out for licensing questions when distributing fonts though.

Answer 3

This is likely an encoding issue. Encoding is the way that a computers interprets and displays a file containing text, using a specific set of characters. (see http://www.text-editor.org/encoding.htm for an explanation of encoding) If the person who you send the file to does not have support for the encoding, it may not display correctly. To fix the issue, try saving the file under an encoding like UTF-8, which has support for a huge number of special characters.