Chinese characters

[philbkr]

I've just installed OpenOffice 3.2.0. I then brought up a document saved in OO in Microsoft Word 6.0, which I had been working on successfully in my previous version. Now I find nearly all capital letters at the beginning of sentences in what I guess are Chinese characters. Any thoughts/solutions? Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Can you upload an extract of your file (see How to attach a document here)?

[philbkr]

Here you go as requested:
Now I'm getting question marks in place of the Chinese characters and Chinese characters for what I have just added to the document. Crazy!!

[RoryOF]

I get only question marks for capital letters, no Chinese. What have I done wrong? The capitals are mostly (not exclusively) at the beginning off a line. Word 6? about 1993, and sixteen bit, if I remember correctly. I think there may be a conversion program to convert Word 6 to Word 97.

[philbkr]

Yeah, the Chinese characters have now totally disappeared but the question marks remain.

[Hagar Delest]

I see the same. But if I add something, it seems to work fine. Why have you saved in MS Word 95 format? I think I remember some topics here about the encoding being not that good with MS Word versions before 2000/XP. Can you install previous version perhaps to check if it works fine and save in another format? Better work in native ODF anyway and export when needed only. Import/export filters for .doc have been made by reverse engineering because until recently the specification were secret.

[philbkr]

Yes, if I add to the document it doesn't change upon reopening. Please, what is the previous version and from where can it be downloaded? Thanks.

[Hagar Delest]

See here: http://filehippo.com/download_openoffice/. But don't know what was your previous version. Don't you remember the splash screen at startup for example?

[floris v]

Opening the file in Wordpad not only gives the question marks, but also a lot of crappy code, so maybe the Word file is simply corrupt.

[TheGurkha]

The question mark characters are not a document -> screen / font translation problem, they are actually stored within the file itself.

Question Mark Character Within File.

[floris v]

I noticed that too - it shows when you open it in Wordpad or Notepad. Wordpad doesn't recognise it as a Word file, that means something.

[TheGurkha]

Wordpad doesn't recognise it as a Word file, that means something.

Yes, and not a good thing

[RoryOF]

There is discussion on opening early versions of Word files at
http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/ ... -Word-2003

[floris v]

So that brings us back to the old advice: save files in the native format of your word processor.

edit: At least don't save in a 15 year old format. I still remember Word 6, it was the first version of Word that I worked with, but it's not economical to maintain import and export filters for antiquated software.

[Hagar Delest]

So that brings us back to the old advice: save files in the native format of your word processor.

Well, in case there are MS Office users, I would say: save in a true open and documented format!


NB: seems that now MS Office 2010 will have a ballot screen offering to use by default OOXML or ODF.

[philbkr]

As they say, live and learn! Thanks, everybody, for chiming in on this. From now on, I'll save in .odt only. I need to export in Microsoft 6.0 because the destination of this document goes to a network which only uses this for this one purpose. (Yeah, I know, they're hopelessly out of date.) Fortunately, this document was not so long that I couldn't fix everything within a short time.

[RoryOF]

If you have much to do in typing up long texts, you might do well to consider OCR. Some of the recent OCR clients are very accurate (I use Omnipage 15 with every satisfaction) and there are a number of opensource OCR engines, of which Tesseract is the most regarded