Lost font trouble

Life Technology
1

I’ve kept a journal on my computer for many years now. Some of my oldest journals were done using Office 95 and 97, and utilizing quite a few different add-on fonts I downloaded over time. It also includes having used the 4 or 5 different computers I’ve gone through over more than 10 years time.

With some of the oldest journal Word files I’ve got, there were fonts used that are not installed on my present computer. My problem is that when I want to view some of these old Word files, certain entries with certain fonts come up as gibberish, messed up font symbols and garble. I’m assuming that is because those fonts are not installed on my present computer. I have no idea which fonts they are anymore though, and probably don’t even have the original downloads.

Anyone have any idea what I can do about this kind of problem? I’ve tried highlighting the troubled parts of the journals and changing the font to a more modern offering (I’m now using Office 2007), but it doesn’t seem to decode it, or transfer it to a readable state.

2

Are you sure it’s not different verisons of Office format for documents?

MS updated the formats from time to time. Try a different filter or resave them as an RTF to see if that helps.

I have documents in old formats of Word for Chinese in Win3.1. They don’t open in English Office (any version) properly. But they do work in Chinese Versions of Office nicely.

I doubt that fonts would be the problem unless the fonts were really weird… why? because basic fonts are the same… letters in each font have the same value ‘ie a is always a, etc.’ The only exception is weird symbol fonts like wingdings…

Kenneth

3

Thanks for your suggestions, but it’s definitely a font problem. I use to download font packs and odd individual fonts. I just don’t get why it doesn’t convert properly when I highlight the entries in question and switch them to one of the more common fonts, Arial, Lucida Console, Times New Roman, etc.