WD97: Unicode Characters Converted Incorrectly (186847)


The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Word 97 for Windows
This article was previously published under Q186847

SYMPTOMS

In Microsoft Word 97, when you open a Microsoft Word 98 Macintosh Edition document containing Unicode characters that are beyond the 256th character (512 bytes) of the document, those Unicode characters are not converted correctly (they will be displayed as "garbage" characters).

CAUSE

The converter for Unicode characters fails to correctly read characters after the 256th character of the document.

RESOLUTION

To correct this problem, obtain Microsoft Word 97 Service Release 2 (SR-2).

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was corrected in Microsoft Office 97 Service Release 2 (SR-2).

For additional information about SR-2, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

151261 OFF97: How to Obtain and Install MS Office 97 SR-2

MORE INFORMATION

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/

Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:11/14/2000
Keywords:kbbug KB186847
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