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Our users are experiencing a very discouraging issue in regards to how MS Word (in Windows) handles non-unicode characters. This issue is confirmed in both Word 2007 and the Word 2010 Beta using Windows XP SP3; I suspect it works the same way in 2003.

Issue:

  1. A user creates a document using a non-unicode font, entering characters to represent scientific notations. For example, he enters a Mu (µ). Note: I pasted in a unicode-compliant Mu for reference.
  2. The user opens his document and attempts to copy / paste this non-unicode character representing a Mu into a web browser for entry into our system. It pastes as an unrecognized character. This is expected.
  3. The user opens his document, selects the non-unicode character and adjusts its font to "Arial Unicode MS," saving the document. He closes / re-opens the document for good measure. Once re-opened, he copies what should be a unicode Mu and pastes it into the web browser. It is still represented as an unrecognized character.
  4. The user creates a new document, sets the font to "Arial Unciode MS" and creates a Mu. He copies this Mu into the web browser and it pastes over in Unicode, as expected.

Conclusion:

Word is not actually converting non-unicode characters into unicode characters when it should, when a unicode font is selected. Instead, it is taking a best-guess for display reasons but doing no actual conversion.

How do I overcome this problem?

  • Can I change some setting in Word to force a conversion? Preferable.
  • Is there a "cleaner" app or Word macro that will do this?
  • Other solutions?

Additional Notes:

  • Re-typing the affected documents using unicode is not an option
  • This is not an issue in Mac OS X using the most recent version of Word. A sample case such as in (3) results in a unicode Mu being pasted into the browser.

Please help!

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  • StackOverflow is a forum for programming-related questions. Try SuperUser.com instead.
    – Borealid
    Jul 13, 2010 at 18:20
  • 1
    Noted should be that you don't need to create a new question over there. With enough votes this question will be moved sooner or later. Just have patience.
    – user26750
    Jul 13, 2010 at 18:24
  • What are non-unicode characters?
    – Philipp
    Jul 13, 2010 at 18:26
  • @Philipp: That's generally the layman's term for characters outside ISO-8859-X range (or whatever default encoding the underlying platform is using, e.g. CP-1252 at Windows or Roman at Mac OS). Very contradicting term indeed since Unicode actually covers every character the human linguistic world is aware of ;)
    – user26750
    Jul 13, 2010 at 18:27
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    Cut and Paste issues can be related to programming, even if this specific question isn't. Substitute "my program" for "MS Word" and the topic doesn't really change.
    – Mark Ransom
    Jul 13, 2010 at 18:33

2 Answers 2

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3

Try using Paste Special; there should be an option for Unicode text.

Note that if the source document was created with a Symbol font, this won't help. Windows doesn't really know that the character is related to a specific Unicode character, the symbol fonts were created before Unicode as a way of meeting a need and the two aren't interchangeable.

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2

A lengthy process but I normally convert such files into images and then process those images through any OCR software. That helps. But, I was myself searching for an even better option.

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