Smiley Face

[sam]

When typing a colon followed by a close parathesis character, word auto
correct to a square box character. Checking the Auto Correct options under
the tools menu reveals that the key stroke combination auto corrects to
what appears to be an asian character. What is going on here?

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Sam,

Usually, the AutoCorrect for should insert a smiley, U+263A, which you could
also insert with Alt+1 or by typing 263A followed by Alt+X (in Word2002/2003).

What version of Word do you use? And do you see more corrupt/weird AutoCorrect
entries?

Greetings,
Klaus

 

[sam]

Klaus,

Thank you for your reply. I am using Word 2002 with SP2. No, I haven't
encountered any other strange things going on with Auto Correct. After your
message I tried the following: In an opened word doc, I entered 263A
followed by Alt+X. This did indeed created a smiley face character. I then
copied this character and opened the Auto Correct Options dialog box through
the tools menu. Next, I deleted the original auto correct option and then
added a new one with the copied character. It works! sort of. The only
thing is that i would like to auto correct to larger font size as the current
one is very small and not really recognizable unless I manually go in and and
either change the font size or zoom in.

Any thoughts?

Sam

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Sam,

It looks like your AutoCorrect entry somehow became corrupt.

Unformatted AutoCorrects are stored in *ACL files, formatted ones in Normal.dot.
I have deleted a lot of the AutoCorrect entries, including the smiley, so I
can't say what kind the smiley is.

You could try to save it as a formatted AC (in the dialog, above "Replace:"):
First give the smiley character a certain font size, then select it, and define
it again in the AC dialog..
Unfortunately, you can't use relative font sizes (say, 3 pt larger than the
current font size).

Klaus