That would depend on the versions of Word concerned, and how you inserted
the characters.
In Word 2001, there was no Unicode. You either had the font with the
characters, or you did not get the characters.
Word X had a little Unicode.
Word 2004 had nearly full Unicode, but some of the Unicode functions were
not working.
Word 2008 has nearly full Unicode, and more of it works.
When you type a character, what you actually enter into the document is a
"number". A single integer, representing the position of the character. In
the old fonts, these numbers went from 0 to 512, so the font designer had to
make a choice as to which 512 characters they would include and where to put
them.
In Unicode, a font "could" contain 65,536 characters. This is enough for
almost every character ever defined in any language to have its own, unique
number. No font on the planet actually contains the full set: most don't go
above about 1,500 characters (glyphs). Arial Unicode MS contains about
32,000.
So if you type a character in Unicode, the document may contain "64,371".
If it does, that's a "ï³" Character. The computer looks in the current font
to see if it contains character 64,371. If it does, no problem. If it
doesn't, the computer looks through the fonts to find a font that does have
that character defined in it. Note: The appearance of that character does
NOT mean that I have a font with 65,000 characters in it
A typical font
will have between 500 and 1,500 characters defined, and the ID numbers of
those fonts can be chosen from anywhere between 1 and 65,536. But I do have
at least one font that has that character number defined in it (and so do
you, if you can see the character).
IF there's more that one font, Word will substitute the font closest in
appearance to the one you were using. Each font has "Family" information
encoded in it that gives a clue as to what the acceptable substitutions are.
Word contains a look-up table to determine from that, what to substitute for
what.
This table updates from version to version, as Word's ability with Unicode
improves, as Mac OS X Unicode features expand, and as the Unicode standard
itself expands.
Since I am not a font and typography expert, I can't say exactly which set
of circumstances apply to your case: but that's the reason.
For more information, see here:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/
Hope this helps
On 6/02/08 6:39 AM, in article ee8be51.11.DeleteThis@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw,
"alientango@officeformac.com" wrote:
> thank you both, thg and john, for all that effort!
>
> still don't understand why Word used to substitute Times CSX+ for Times where
> the accented characters are concerned but now uses Monaco instead.
>
> (thg: Monaco shows up in new docs, hence it doesn't show in the old doc i
> sent)
>
> but maybe it doesn't matter now. getting rid of Times CSX+ and am going to use
> Times (or Gandhari, thanks for the link, thg!) from now on, simplify my life!
>
> thanks again!
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here:
http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@mcghie.name
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