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Word substituting Wingdings for text

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by dcperich 2 views

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I have had a problem with MS Word substituting the "Wingdings" font for what is supposed to be readable text. This often happens when the original text is in a vector graphic like a .wmf file or in a .pdf file (these are both cases where the text in the image is interpreted by the software as text rather than as part of a raster image.) The problem occurs off-and-on. It happened when I exported a picture that incuded text to a .wmf file. It all looked fine on my machine and my printouts but it became unreadable on another computer. I also had the problem on my computer when I upgraded my acrobat reader to the latest version. It looked fine on my screen but printed in wingdings on several printers. I have had the same problem with .PDF files. A programemr somewhere must have decided that Wingdings was the default substitution of choice under some circumstances. Why??

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by rindi1

This could happen if you open a word file on a PC other than the one you saved the file on, and this PC doesn't have all the same fonts installed. In word, under Tools, Save, you can tell word to embed the truetype fonts so that they should display right on PCs that don't have those fonts installed. Why word substitutes unknown fonts with wingdings, I don't know.

by dcperich

Since I've had the problem both in Word and in Acrobat reader, I think the substitution choice is made by WINDOWS. Otherwise, the programers of both MSWord and Acrobat are choosing Wingdings as the substitution. I wonder if there's a setting in the registery to change it.

by carol.cantor

I can't find a common denominator for the Wingdings. It doesn't happend all the time or in every instance. It appears to be random and does not matter which version of MS Word in which I save a document. I change the text and save the document, but after closing the document and reopening it, the wingdings are back. Has anyone found a solution to rid a document permanently of the wingding thing?

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