Scott Meyers wrote:
I recently started working with OOo, and I just saved my Writer document
in Word 97/2000/XP format. I then opened the document in Word XP, and I
was surprised to see that (1) frame content (e.g., listings and
diagrams) seemed to be missing entirely, (2) special symbols were
missing from the text (e.g., the mathematical "there exists" symbol,
which looks like a backwards capital E and which is present in Windows'
Symbol font), (3) some tab-based text was placed at the wrong locations
on the page (probably at the wrong tab stop), (4) superscripted text was
not superscripted, and (5) cross references to frames were replaced with
"Error! Reference source not found."
I don't need to share documents with people using Word, so these issues
aren't really problems for me, but I can imagine they'd be deal-killers
for other people. Should I be surprised to see so many things that
don't translate correctly from Writer to Word?
They may be deal-killers in some cases.
But are the missing symbols you mention created in MS Word as normal
text or using special mathematical Word functions? If the latter, then I
am not surprised that there are some problems when translating to any
other word processor.
I would be surprised to learn that characters in normal text produced by
normal text processing using Unicode fonts don’t translate properly 99%
of the time.
You mention the Windows Symbol Font. This is a legacy font dating back
to pre-Unicode days which works by substituting special symbols for
normal characters. It is now useful only for viewing legacy documents
and should not be used in new documents. It especially causes problems
in Web pages because some characters may not come through or may be
subject to undesired code page translations. All symbols in this font
are included in Unicode (and in many of the normal system fonts that
come with Windows Vista: Times New Roman, Helvetica, Courier, and so
forth). Using non-Unicode fonts is not recommended if they can be avoided.
See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_windows.html#symbol and
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/ for some free or low-cost
fonts. The new STIX fonts, sponsored by several leading scientific and
mathematical publishers were available free for a short time in a beta
version and are expected to be released free later this year.
Jim Allan
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