Word and Asian fonts?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

I'm using Word X on the Mac, with all the latest patches applied and 
Asian language support installed. I'm editing in English, but many 
files come to me from Japan or China.

Most of the time, the files I receive from my Japanese and Chinese 
clients pose few problems. But every so often, I get a file with a 
mismatch between the onscreen display of the type and where Word 
believes that the cursor actually exists. So, for example, I'll use 
Command-RightArrow to move to the start of the next word in a line, but 
the cursor will appear midway through the word. As a result, I have no 
idea where the insertion point is, and can only discover this through 
experimentation--type a key and see what happens. As you can imagine, 
this makes editing a nightmare.

One solution that occasionally works is to open a new blank document 
and insert the file. What this does is display the contents of the 
document using the settings specified by my own Normal template. 
Because I haven't actually changed any of the style names or font 
specifications, this seems to cause no grief for the author; however, 
it saves my bacon by telling Word to display the onscreen text using 
the font substitution settings that I have defined rather than the 
settings defined by the author's template.

But every so often, as is the case today for a particularly thorny 
Chinese manuscript*, nothing seems to work: I've tried the "insert 
file" trick with no luck. I've tried modifying the "compatibility" 
settings (in the Preferences dialog) to use/not use printer metrics to 
lay out the screen display; to use/not use Asian line breaks; and a 
couple other settings that seemed logical. I even forced Word to use 
Times New Roman for all the Asian fonts. No luck.

* Since you asked <g>, it's a very cool economic model that applies 
thermodynamics principles in general, and entropy in particular, to 
model the urban environment as if it were an organism with a 
metabolism. I understand it well enough to rewrite it, much to my 
pleased surprise. And yes, that constitutes bragging. <g>

I've also tried exporting the file to RTF and reimporting it, but this 
crashes Word big time; I suspect it's the embedded equations, which I 
can't afford to simply delete, and it would be time-consuming in the 
extreme to manually delete and reinsert them.

Any suggestions (particularly from people who work regularly with Asian 
files using North American or European versions of Word) on how I can 
solve this problem once and for all? Upgrading to Word 2004 is a 
possibility, but not one I'm eager to try; this is the equivalent to 
Word XP on the PC, which is the version that just about made revision 
tracking unusable. Xie xie nin!

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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