wrong characters (@ A) appear in place of correct punctuation

[Kim]

Hello,

Via e-mail, I sent a docx document that looked perfectly good on my two
computers to other people. When they received and opened the document, Word
had changed all quotation marks, apostrophes, and m-dashes into other
characters. For example, open quotation mark (") reads as a weird looking
"A", and close quotation mark (") reads as @.

But, when they sent the document back to me and I opened it, the document
read correctly again, as it had in the original. I had to verify their
claims by sending it to a colleague, and, sure enough, these wrong characters
appeared again.

I tried saving the document in compatibility mode and resending it, but the
problem recurred.

Any ideas on how this glitch can be corrected?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Was this document created new in Word 2007, or was it a legacy document? If
the latter, it almost certainly originated in WordPerfect, where those
characters were inserted in the WP Typographic Symbols font. If you have
this font installed on your computer, you will see the characters as
intended; users without the font installed will see the substitutions you
mention. One quick way to check on this is to look at the font list in Word
and see if WP Typographic Symbols is listed. If so, I'd be willing to bet
that's the issue.

If so, there's really no way around it (short of having everyone else you
deal with install this font) except to use Replace to replace the existing
characters with the correct ones in the Default Paragraph Font. If you're
lucky, you can copy the symbol in the text and paste it into "Find what" box
in the Replace dialog (using Ctrl+V), type or paste the correct symbol in
the "Replace with" box, and Replace All (or replace one at a time
carefully). You can use straight quotes and apostrophes in the "Replace
with" box, as Word will AutoFormat them as they're inserted.