Photo from Flickr, by Eric baum
“I am ready to throw this out the window!” My client was frustrated. No matter how he sent me his document – Word .doc, Word .docx, Text, RTF, even HTM – it STILL contained strange characters : ?, Y, A, @, and =. What was more frustrating — he couldn’t see these oddities on his two computers.
The Plot: Word Perfect to Word Conversion…
My client, we’ll call him Joe, originally created his 335 page, 179,000 word document in Word Perfect. With the upgrade to his new machine he wanted to work in the Microsoft Word platform. Joe opened up the Word and from within the Word program, opened and saved a version of his manuscript.
What should have been an easy conversion has turned into a character nightmare. After 2 hours on the phone, the solution was clear — we’d have to manually correct the strange character issues. And more devastating was that I would have to be the one to make the changes, since what he could not see the problem on his machine.
The Characters…
There were consistent and blatant errors floating around his manuscript. Though he was not privy to the problem, I was. Here are a list of the errors I saw with each file sent to me:
Open quote would be either an uppercase A or a ? (if at the beginning of a paragraph)
Closing quote would convert to an “at” symbol (@)
Apostrophes were replaced with the equal sign (=)
I even had a date (1942) appear as <42.EXAMPLE: ?No, I don=t think so,@ I said immediately. AI think Desert Storm proved the politicians and the military got the message. Quick in and out with lots of force.@
What a mess!
After researching the Internet, I found this character flaw to be common. Yet no quick solution was evident. The problem lies withing the conversion from WordPerfect to Word.
The Scene…
Word Perfect has what they call WP Typographic Symbols font. If this font is not installed on a computer, then the results are displayed using the default character font. You remove “seeing” the strange characters by installing the WP Typographic Symbols font set, but that will not fix the problem, especially if you send the file to someone else who does not have that font set.
This will be a major issue is when you try to convert the file into an ebook. Upon ebook conversion, the resulting product will incorporate the strange symbols and characters – not what you want your readership to see.
The Climax: Solving the Crime…
If you are working in Word and were previously using WordPerfect – send your document to a friend who DOES NOT have WordPerfect on their machine. Have them look at your file and if it contains strange characters, you can do the following.
Convert the Original WP file
If you have your original Word perfect file, you can open that, and choose Save As to a Word document.
A PCReview forum member offers that the conversion should be done from within the WordPerfect program, not Word. If you have a WordPerfect document that uses double quotes, apostrophes, and section marks, use the ‘Save As’ feature in WordPerfect and save it as a Word 2003 document. The characters should convert properly; however, I do not own Word Perfect, so I cannot validate this — but it makes sense.
Find and Replace
However, in the case of Joe, he made massive edits and rather than starting over the only way to remove these pesky bugs is by hand.
- Open your Word document
- Save as a copy of the Original – name it MyBook_WP.doc
Never work from the original – always make a back up.- Highlight and copy one of the odd characters, such as @
To copy: Ctr + C (PC); Cmd+C (Mac)- Using the Replace feature, paste the character in the “find” field
To place: Ctr + V (PC); Cmd+V (Mac)
Replace* can be found under the EDIT menu- Put a quote ( ” ) in the replace field.
- If you click Replace ALL, it will replace all “@” signs with a quote. You can also move through the document one by one, clicking Find and choosing to replace, or “Find Again.”
- When it says it has reached the end of the document and do you want to continue, click yes. You want to make sure ALL of the document if searched.
*In some programs Replace is called Find and Replace. Because of the numerous versions of Word, refer to your manual if you can’t find the Replace feature.
Special Find and Replace
The problem with the ? and A replacement is that you have these characters in your document, and you definitely do not want to replace them with a quote mark. I did find a solution to the “?”.
For the ? at the front of each sentence, you can choose to use special characters in your replace; where ^p means paragraph.
- Open the Find and Replace and type replace ^p? with ”
This takes each new paragraph with the ? as the first character and replaces it with an open quote mark. This will not replace the ? at the end of a sentence.
To get the ^ hold the shift key and hit the 6 on the keyboard.
The Epilogue…
To test if you have removed all the anomalies, highlight all the text in your document and convert to Times New Roman. With the all the text still highlighted, view the font display in your text menu. If it does NOT say Times New Roman, then there is a strange character floating around in the document.
At this point you can either remove the WP Typographic Symbols font, restart your machine and view the Word document, or send to a friend and have them correct it for you. (make sure it is a trusted friend.)
The bad news, it is going to take some time to fix. The good news is once the document has been cleaned, you will not have any more issues with these anomalies. So roll up your sleeves and let’s get started.
Resource
This is an old forum post, but there is a lot of good information that may help you.
PCReview.co.uk: Strange Characters when converting from Word 2007 to Word 2003
