[Solved] Bullet points turned into questions marks

[cavemantraining]

Hello all. I upgraded my Mac to OS High Sierra. Now all my documents which had bullet points in it have now turned into Questions marks. Sample attached.

How can I fix this without redoing all the work? Thanks in advance.

[keme]

Bullet points look fine. Most likely, the High Sierra upgrade has made some changes to font files or font handling. Your file content remains unchanged, but suddenly the information about "how should the bullet character look" is no longer available to Writer.

At best, a reboot fixes the issue. Next thing to try is running the OpenOffice installer for a repair.

If that doesn't help, post back here and we'll look into other possible causes.

[robleyd]

Is it possible you are missing a font which was available previously? Your document displays bullets correctly for me.

[cavemantraining]

It might be possible, but I transferred all fonts from the other computer. Any way to see if it is missing a font?

[robleyd]

There is the Testfonts extension

[cavemantraining]

Thanks, that's great. Ran it, no missing fonts. So that's not the issue.

File: /Users/tacofleur/Documents/Projects/Interval Timer/workout timer.doc

Missing fonts - found: 0 times

Direct formatting fonts - found: 2 times
 Arial  Bold
 Arial  Bold italic

Fonts assigned to used paragraph styles - found: 8 times
Default  Times New Roman  Regular
Footer  Times New Roman  Regular
Header  Times New Roman  Regular
Heading  Arial  Regular
Heading 1  Arial  Bold
Heading 2  Arial  Bold italic
Heading 3  Arial  Bold
Text body  Times New Roman  Regular

Fonts assigned to used character styles - found: 2 times
Default  Times New Roman  Regular
Internet Link  Times New Roman  Regular

Available system fonts - found: 1071 times
FONT NAME FONT STYLE WEIGHT SLANT
 AUSTRALIA  TITLE 100 0
 Adobe Arabic  Regular 100 0
 Adobe Arabic  Italic 100 2
 Adobe Arabic  Bold 150 0
 Adobe Arabic  Bold Italic 150 2
 Adobe Caslon Pro  Regular 100 0
 Adobe Caslon Pro  Italic 100 2

[John_Ha]

See Item 2 in See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[cavemantraining]

So I went through them by hand, one by one, all hundred of them deleting them, and it did nothing. If I use option two from below, then yes, it works, but that means a hell of a lot of work, I'd like to be able to change something that will fix this in the hundreds of documents I have. PS. this also occurs in .odt

Either delete these unwanted Character Styles by

1 press F11 to open the Styles and Formatting window
2 click Character Styles - second icon
3 right click the character styles with names beginning WW8 > delete

This fixes it throughout the entire document.

Or, fix just one occurrence by resetting it to use the Writer defaults

1 place the cursor in a bulleted line and go Format > Bullets and Numbering
2 choose the Options tab
3 Character Style will be something like WW8Num1z0. Set it to Numbering Symbols (or None as appropriate)

[John_Ha]

The WW8Num1z0 style means the document has at some stage been saved as a .doc file - it probably started life as a .doc file saved by MS Word.

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[Hagar Delest]

See perhaps: [Solved] Bullet Point Characters Incorrect.

[keme]

Thanks, that's great. Ran it, no missing fonts. So that's not the issue.
...

Perhaps it is anyway.

As far as I can tell, the addon identifies fonts used for text formatting in your document. The "special glyphs" used for such things as bullet points, math formula operators, error indicators (broken link) etc., may be taken from special fonts, and those are not picked up by the tool.

[John_Ha]

Bullets are displayed using the Open Symbol font and AOO installs the Open Symbol font when it installs. If the Open Symbol font is missing, the top level bullet appears with a 10 in the bullet as in the image. See Re: Bullets were working fine, why did someone mess that?

Clipboard01.gif (23.2 KiB) Viewed 4872 times

Search the forum with bullets to find many threads.

[MrProgrammer]

Now all my documents which had bullet points in it have now turned into Questions marks

[Tutorial] Mac FAQ Q26/A26

If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the title. You can select the green checkmark icon at the same time.

[Bill]

3 Character Style will be something like WW8Num1z0.

The WW8Num... character styles specify the "Symbol" font. Is that font installed?