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Tools: Unicode display tip for users of older versions of Word
Subject:Tools: Unicode display tip for users of older versions of Word From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:15:00 -0500
Here's a potentially useful tip for users of Word X on the Mac, and
possibly older versions on the Mac and PC that don't fully support
Unicode: you're one of us if you frequently encounters characters or
symbols that appear as underscores (_) or boxes, indicating that Word
doesn't know how to display the character or symbol.
I recently noticed that the people who wrote Word's main text-display
code (which controls what you see in the main document window)
haven't been talking to the people who wrote the code that displays
comments when you hover the cursor over highlighted text containing a
comment (which pops up a little balloon containing the comment text).
Sometimes a character will display in the main document window, but
not when you hover the cursor and the balloon pops up; sometimes a
character will display when you hover the cursor but not in the main
window.
That leads us to the tip: If you can't see a character in the main
text, try pasting it into a comment, then close the Comments window
and hover the cursor over the new comment to pop up the balloon.
Surprisingly, the mystery character is now visible!
This will save me a considerable amount of time until I finally bite
the bullet and upgrade to a more recent version of Word. Hope it
saves you some time too!
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