Font, Word, and Acrobat problem

[carbonel]

I have a document that I need to print TODAY. This is the sixth in a series (my zine for Escapade!), and all of them have essentially the same formatting layout. The primary font is Century Schoolbook.

In place of dingbats from another font, I'm using a series of triangles -- both up-pointing and down-pointing -- as dividers.

However, after closing Word last night, when I re-opened my document, my dingbats have turned into different characters. They now display as the Greek lowercase letters sigma and tau, instead of my triangles.

I keep the final version of the document as a PDF, and when I run the document through Acrobat, the sigmas and taus are still there.

If I open an earlier document in the series, the triangles are there as they should be. I haven't tried distilling that earlier document in Acrobat for fear of breaking that one as well. If I paste the triangles from the previous document into the current document, they turn into Greek, so it's obviously some sort of display or embedding problem, and not a rogue search-and-replace.

I'm using Word 2003 and Acrobat 8.0. I've tried various font embedding settings in Acrobat, since when I first printed the document a couple of days ago, the triangles showed up as v's and w's, but tweaking the font settings fixed that.

Does anyone have any ideas about what I can do to fix this? If I can't print this today, it's going to be a disaster.

(Late thought: Could it be a corrupt copy of Century Schoolbook?)

Comments

[haniaw.livejournal.com]

If you'd like to send me your previous PDF which shows what it's supposed to look like and your final version Word source file, I may be able to help. Since I have the same software available, I could try to generate a clean PDF and send it back to you. My email is hania.wojtowicz@cibc.com.

[carbonel]

E-mail on its way, though I can't send the final Word document yet -- too much real job work.

[beadslut.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's the printer? When you used the format before did you use the same printer settings? I'd be happy to give it a try with the same software as well.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

If I had to guess, I'd say it was a problem with Styles. Sometimes Word re-applies a style (thereby changing the font) when you don't want it to. Solution is to screw around with Styles, which is a pain.

[carbonel]

See comment below to Kip. Definitely not a styles issue. My current theory is a very slightly corrupt document.

Word happens.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I agree with barondave, it sounds like a font has changed, and Styles might be the reason. Are you in Windows? If so, go to your system accessories and get the Character Map. Select the font you are in, and look to see if it has any good bullet symbols you could use. If you're on a Mac, you might have to use Key Caps to do the same thing (I miss the Mac utility I used to have at work that showed me all the possible characters in a given font, all at once -- sigh).

If all else fails, try just using asterisks for your bullets.

[carbonel]

It's something more subtle than that -- some sort of weird corruption. The document style was exactly the way it ought to be, but it wasn't displaying correctly.

I ended up taking my document text and pasting it into an earlier document that was behaving properly, and it reverted to displaying correctly.

For that matter, when I sent my misbehaving document to Hania, it displayed properly.

Normally I consider myself a Word maven, and I'm very comfortable with styles, but this was something weird.

If I can just get my PDF to generate properly once I've made my final edits, life will be good -- except for being several hours behind in my planning.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Word documents get corrupted in weird ways. Sometimes it happens when a document has been revised a lot, because Word seems to store the original version and then make a list of all the changes in order they were made. I should have thought of this before -- something you can do in such cases is to "Save As" instead of just using "Save." This way, the document is saved as it is, instead of as [original] plus [change] plus [change] plus...

But it sounds like you've probably got it under control now without any help from me. Life is good.