WD2002: Symbol Characters Are Changed to Box Characters (290978)

WORKAROUND

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290140 OFFXP: How to Run Sample Code from Knowledge Base Articles

The following Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro converts the symbol characters to non-symbol characters.

NOTE: Before you run this macro, select the box characters.

Sub ConvertSymbol()

   Dim dlg As Object
   Dim NoFC As Integer
   Dim SCP As Integer
   Dim StartRange As Range
   Dim UniCodeNum As Integer

   ' Temporarily disable Screen Updating
   Application.ScreenUpdating = False

   ' Temporarily disable Smart Cut & Paste
   If Options.SmartCutPaste = True Then
      SCP = 1
      Options.SmartCutPaste = False
   End If

   ' Temporarily display field text
   If ActiveWindow.View.ShowFieldCodes = False Then
      NoFC = 1
      ActiveWindow.View.ShowFieldCodes = True
   End If

   ' Set StartRange variable to current selection's range
   Set StartRange = Selection.Range
   Selection.Collapse

   ' Select first, then each next character in user-defined selection
   Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Extend:=wdExtend
   While Selection.End <= StartRange.End And _
      ActiveDocument.Content.End > Selection.End

      ' If the character is a space, then move to next character
      Set dlg = Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
      UniCodeNum = dlg.charnum

      If UniCodeNum = 32 Then
         Selection.Collapse
         Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Extend:=wdMove
         Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Extend:=wdExtend
      End If

      ' Loop, converting symbol Unicode characters to ASCII characters
      Set dlg = Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
      UniCodeNum = dlg.charnum

      While UniCodeNum < 0 And Selection.End <= StartRange.End _
         And ActiveDocument.Content.End > Selection.End
            Selection.Delete
            Selection.InsertAfter (ChrW(UniCodeNum + 4096))
            Selection.Collapse (wdCollapseEnd)
            Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Extend:=wdExtend
            Set dlg = Dialogs(wdDialogInsertSymbol)
            UniCodeNum = dlg.charnum
      Wend

      Selection.Collapse (wdCollapseEnd)
      Selection.MoveRight unit:=wdCharacter, Extend:=wdExtend
   Wend

   ' Reset Word document settings
   If SCP = 1 Then Options.SmartCutPaste = True
   If NoFC = 1 Then ActiveWindow.View.ShowFieldCodes = False
      Selection.Collapse (wdCollapseStart)
      Selection.MoveLeft unit:=wdCharacter
      Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub

NOTE: After you run the macro and the text is converted to non-symbol characters, you may need to format the text to the correct font.

MORE INFORMATION

The following table lists common symbol and non-symbol fonts:

Symbol fonts	Non-symbol fonts
Bookshelf Symbol 3	Arial
Marlett	Book Antiqua
Monotype Sorts	Bookman Old Style
MS Outlook	Century Schoolbook
MT Extra	Courier New
Symbol	Garamond
Wingdings	Times New Roman

Unicode

Unicode is a 16-bit character set designed to cover all of 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 in UNIX and Microsoft 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 Microsoft Windows NT operating system.

Unicode is a 16-bit character set, in which 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 Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft 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 "-" character 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 the following location:

http://www.unicode.org/