WD2000: Question Marks Replace Foreign Text Saved As Word 6.0/95

• Microsoft Word 2000

SYMPTOMS

When you open a document containing language characters and formatting that do not match the language version of Word 2000 you are using, and

• you save the document in an earlier version of Word--for example, Word 6.0/95(*.doc)--



-and-


• you close and then re-open the document,

CAUSE

The document converter encodes using the character set of the installation language of Office.

For example, the "English US" version of Microsoft Office 2000 uses the installation language character set 1033 (English US). During conversion, the foreign language characters--for example, Russian, which encodes using the 1252 character set--are replaced by the installation language character set 1033 (English US).

Unicode characters (2 bytes per character) are mapped to corresponding ANSI characters or are converted to question marks (?).

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, you must install the foreign language version of Microsoft Office 2000 that matches the language of the document. The document then will have that language as the installation language and will be encoded to earlier versions of Word as expected.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about the limitations of converting to Word 6.0/95 format, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q212268 WD2000: Part 1: Limitations Converting to Word 6.0/95 Format

Q216920 WD2000: Part 2: Limitations Converting to Word 6.0/95 Format

Additional query words:

Keywords          : kbdta wd2000 
Version           : WINDOWS:2000
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbprb 

Last Reviewed: June 10, 1999