Microsoft word 2008 for mac webdings code#
Microsoft word 2008 for mac webdings windows#

Hooray, a successful transcoding from Wingdings to Unicode! The same thing happens if you choose to save the document as Unicode text. That’s Unicode character 8594 (0x2192), otherwise known as RIGHTWARDS ARROW. When you save this document as HTML and view it in a browser, the right arrow appears in the title bar as →. That’s because this character is in the private use area of the Unicode codepoint range, where they don’t define any characters. If you’re like me you probably don’t have a glyph for this character and your browser is probably displaying a question mark.

Microsoft word 2008 for mac webdings code#

It does a translation of the inserted character into unicode at the time you insert it! Character code 224 becomes Unicode character 61664, which looks like this: . So what happens on the Mac? Have a look at the insert symbol dialog on Word 2004 for MacOS X: OK it’s not a difficult fix, probably three lines worth of XSLT, but I mean really.Īnyway what this does show is that Word 2003 can do the Wingdings to Unicode mapping, albeit only for certain output formats (ie XML and not HTML). OK so maybe you don’t buy all this XML philosophy about text versus markup, but on a purely practical level, if every XML parser in the world can understand this character encoded as an entity (ie  ), then that should be the way to go, right?Īs it stands, every application that wants to reliably parse the text from a WordML document has to special-case the w:sym element. It’s a single character ( presumably unicode, but that’s a spec problem) represented as … an XML element. OMG, what were they thinking? Check out the documentation for the w:sym element. Well if you save the document as XML, look how it gets encoded: You might be wondering whether or not Word is even capable of translating the different character encodings, that it obviously uses under the covers, into Unicode. Basically as soon as you publish your Word document with all it’s funky character encodings as HTML, it becomes an incomprehensible mess (or in my case, more of an incomprehensible mess) because it screws up the transcoding of symbol characters to Unicode. These formats have no need to support multiple character encodings, because we have Unicode. Like the web (and I’m including HTML and XML here).

The problem comes when you go to other domains that don’t allow mutliple character encodings. I hate to think of the complexity behind the scenes. So it’s OK to use multiple character sets in Word, as long as you trust it to keep track of which parts of your document use which character encodings. Compare two fonts like Arial and Times New Roman, and you’ll find that the appearance might be different for the same character code, it’s still the same character. Note that in each case the characters are semantically different. Where Unicode, US-ASCII and most other character sets use the value 65 to represent a capital A, Wingdings uses it to represent a hand with two fingers up in a V for Victory sign (not unlike ✌, the unicode VICTORY HAND). So where Unicode uses 224 to represent an à, Wingdings uses it to represent a right arrow. That is, it contains it’s own mapping of character codes to characters. Hmm, looks mighty familiar!īasically Wingdings is it’s own character set. See the character code is listed as 224? Well, let’s look at Unicode character 224: à. So what’s really going on here? Look more closely at the insert symbol dialog box above. And if it doesn’t have the right symbol for you, you probably should be embedding a graphic. Instead use a Unicode font like Arial - it’s got all the symbols you’ll ever need.

Microsoft word 2008 for mac webdings windows#

Given this breakage, it seems the safest thing to do is not use Wingdings at all, at least on Windows (see below for MacOS X comparison). I find it just incredible that anyone would design an email program this way. In fact it’s far worse in Outlook, because when you’ve selected “Plain Text” as the format for the email, the right arrow still appears as a right arrow, but when it’s sent it changes to an à. The same thing can happen if you copy and paste into FrontPage, and then use “clear formatting”. That’s right, there’s an à where your arrow should be, in both the title and body of the document. So you think you’ve just inserted a right arrow into the document eh? OK well try saving the document as HTML and opening it in Mozilla. Set the font to Wingdings and insert the Right Arrow character: Open up a new document in Microsoft Word 2003 on Windows XP. If you don’t think this is fun, then please just take my advice and move on. Or reverse engineering various Microsoft products to see how broken they are. If you like discussing the intimate details of character encodings, that is.