Troubleshooting Corrupt Office Text Results with Older Multilingual Files

There may be occasions when a user cannot successfully use Microsoft Office 2003 Editions to open a file created in an older system. There are several possible scenarios that can create this problem, and for each situation there are steps you can take to work around the issues, including the following:

• The document is a pre-Office 97 document that was created using some incorrectly made TrueType fonts.

  For example, a document that looked fine in Microsoft Word 95 can be opened in Microsoft Word 2002, and the document text is converted to a mixture of characters from Western Europe. This situation occurs because the fonts used in the Word 95 document were marked internally as Western European, and the text data was therefore converted to Unicode Western European text. There are a few other variations on this problem involving symbol fonts; but in all cases you can try one of the following solutions to correct the problem:

  • Change the fonts that display the incorrect characters.

  • Use the “broken fonts add-in” that ships with Office 2003 Editions. In Word, install the add-in. Then, on the Tools menu, click Repair Broken Text.

• The document is a pre-Office 97 document created under a “shell” program designed to enable English Microsoft Windows to support Chinese or other Asian language (for example, Chinese Star, RichWin, and TwinBridge).

  In this case, try one of the following solutions:

  • If you open the document in Word, ensure that the correct Chinese language is enabled by checking the setting in the Microsoft Office Language Settings tool (in Windows XP, click Start, then point to All Programs, then point to Microsoft Office Tools, then click Microsoft Office 2003 Language Settings). Then set options in Word for the document so that the correct Far Asian features are used.

To set Word features appropriate for Far Asian language documents

1. In Word, on the Tools menu, click Options.

2. On the Compatibility tab, set the value of the Recommend options for option to the appropriate setting—for example, English Word 6/95 documents.

3. In the Options section, select the features that are appropriate for a Far Asian document. (By default in this scenario, Word selects the options that are compatible with an English document.)

   • If characters are not displayed correctly in Word, try changing the following setting. On the Tools menu, click Options, then click the General tab (if it is not already selected). Under English Word 6.0/95 documents, in the drop-down list, choose Automatically detect Asian text.

   • If you open the document in Microsoft PowerPoint, on the Tools menu, click Options, then click Asian. Locate the option convert from font-associated text, and set the language correctly.

• The document is HTML, and the encoding of the file is not marked correctly in the file.

  In this case, with the document currently open, on the Tools menu, click Options, then click the General tab, and click Web Options. Click the Encoding tab, then change the encoding to open the file with different values until the characters in the file are shown correctly