SILDoulos IPA 93 font in Word 2004

[Laurie A. Duncan]

We've begun to roll out Office 2004 to some of our more advanced users for
testing and have come across an issue with the SILDoulos IPA 93 font.

Word docs created in previous versions that use this font (it's used for
phonetics in certain documents) continue to appear fine in Office 2001 and
earlier, however, the font becomes boxes when the same doc is opened in
Office 2004. Furthermore, new docs created with Office 2004 cannot use the
font - no matter how you try to apply the font style, it still causes the
word to appear either as another font (a times variant usually) or with one
of those boxes directly after the formatted word.

We have confirmed this problem on multiple machines, even with the font
freshly installed.

Is there a workaround for this behavior or is this a bug?

Thank you,

LD

 

[matt neuburg]

We've begun to roll out Office 2004 to some of our more advanced users for
testing and have come across an issue with the SILDoulos IPA 93 font.

Word docs created in previous versions that use this font (it's used for
phonetics in certain documents) continue to appear fine in Office 2001 and
earlier, however, the font becomes boxes when the same doc is opened in
Office 2004. Furthermore, new docs created with Office 2004 cannot use the
font - no matter how you try to apply the font style, it still causes the
word to appear either as another font (a times variant usually) or with one
of those boxes directly after the formatted word.

We have confirmed this problem on multiple machines, even with the font
freshly installed.

Is there a workaround for this behavior or is this a bug?

We just went through this in great depth; in fact, it's such a fruitful
example that I'm using it for an ebook on Word that I'm writing. So,
check the archives.

Basically the answer is that SILDoulosIPA 93 is a bad font in relation
to Mac OS X, and upgrading to Word 2004 simply exposes the badness. This
font has three cmap tables, and with Word 2004, the Unicode table is
(rightly) used. But it uses the Unicode Private Use Area, and this is
incompatible with the old Macintosh table, which was what we call an
ASCII hack, so you get the boxes.

The solution, I'm afraid, is to convert your characters one at a time.
Most of the characters have Unicode equivalents in normal Mac OS X
Panther fonts; and they all have equivalents in the new DoulosSIL font,
which is a proper Unicode font and works great. Feel free to send me a
document and I'll convert a few characters for you, to show you the
procedure, if you can't figure out what I'm talking about. m.

 

[Laurie A. Duncan]

Thank you, matt. I have read the thread you reference in the archives and
now have a better grasp of the problem. I appreciate your offer to help out.
We are going to check out Klaus' macro as well as your suggestion and
determine what would be the best work-around for the affected documents.

Laurie