accentuated characters are mistaken when exchanging between Mac and PC

Thread view:

Enable EMail Alerts

Start New Thread

Thread rating:

juanjo - 22 Jun 2005 22:16 GMT

I am suffering a rather weird error.

I take an Excel or Word table with spanish accentuated words. When I
paste this table as graphic in Powerpoint I see it correctly in the Mac
but when I send it to a Windows machine all the the special character
got corrupted.

This error is quite annoying and it's avoiding a Mac OS X deploy in my
company.

What Should I do?

sincerely,

Juan José Vázquez
jjvazquez@polar.es
www.shspolar.es
www,shs.de

Reply to this Message

Steve Rindsberg - 23 Jun 2005 04:09 GMT

> I am suffering a rather weird error.
>
> I take an Excel or Word table with spanish accentuated words. When I
> paste this table as graphic in Powerpoint I see it correctly in the Mac
> but when I send it to a Windows machine all the the special character
> got corrupted.

It may help if you choose a Unicode font (one capable of including more than
255 characters).

Another thing to try is ungrouping the pasted content. That'll turn it into
PPT text and graphics; the last time I tested, PPT was pretty good at
translating Mac character mapping to Windows character mapping, but only for
it's own text. It can't really "see" text inside imported graphics or pasted
content from other apps.

> This error is quite annoying and it's avoiding a Mac OS X deploy in my
> company.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> www.shspolar.es
> www,shs.de

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

Reply to this Message

Paul Berkowitz - 23 Jun 2005 04:42 GMT

On 6/22/05 8:09 PM, in article VA.00001830.31f6802d@localhost.com, "Steve
Rindsberg" <abuse@localhost.com> wrote:

> It may help if you choose a Unicode font (one capable of including more than
> 255 characters).

Many of the Mac non-Unicode fonts are/were able to include far more than 255
characters. Some of the Asian ones had up to 15,000 characters, all in Mac
"international text". But they still didn't have real Unicode. The European
fonts did not include characters needed for Eastern European or Cyrillic txt
- you had to have special dedicated fonts for those. They always had the
accents needed for Spanish, however, but the character encoding would be
different from that used by Windows PPT, so the characters would come out
wrong on Windows.

juanjo does not say what version of PPT he has. Nor does he say which font
he's using. If he's in PPT X or earlier (2001, 98) it won't do him any good
at all to "get a Unicode font" since those versions of Word can't use
Unicode anyway: the font will be replaced by a non-Unicode one and he'll
still have the same problems. If he is in PPT 2004, he should simply switch
to one of the MS Unicode fonts already provided (MS, because if he uses an
Apple Unicode font such as Lucida Grande it will be replaced on Windows -
though he should still get the accents right). European Unicode fonts in
Office 2004 include Times New Roman, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Century, Arial.
Stick to those.

Signature

Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.

PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.

Reply to this Message

Steve Rindsberg - 23 Jun 2005 15:26 GMT

> On 6/22/05 8:09 PM, in article VA.00001830.31f6802d@localhost.com, "Steve
> Rindsberg" <abuse@localhost.com> wrote:
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> Many of the Mac non-Unicode fonts are/were able to include far more than 255
> characters.

Likewise on the PC, but I was trying to keep it simple for starters. ;-)

> Some of the Asian ones had up to 15,000 characters, all in Mac
> "international text".

Let's not even think about Asian text pre-unicode. IIRC there are at least 5
different encoding systems, all incompatible to one degree or another, and all
this w/o even having to jump between Mac and PC. The fact that Apple did a good
job of it early on (vs all the proprietary PC "standards") is one reason Mac's
so popular in Japan.

> juanjo does not say what version of PPT he has. Nor does he say which font
> he's using. If he's in PPT X or earlier (2001, 98) it won't do him any good
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> to one of the MS Unicode fonts already provided (MS, because if he uses an
> Apple Unicode font such as Lucida Grande it will be replaced on Windows -

Good points. Yes. And now for a brief side trip:

Hmm. I have PPTX, not 2004, and am able to use Lucida Grande (and several other
common TT fonts that, judging by their file sizes, have to contain a lot more
glyphs than their 255-char cousins). But the TT editor in the Asian type
toolset doesn't show more than 255 characters in the font. The old problem: is
it the thing being measured or the measuring device that doesn't measure up?
Arghhh. I'm guessing that this is a non-Unicode version of the font though,
based on what you've said.

MS has a nifty Explorer extension that tells you nearly everything you'd want to
know about a font; between that and the newer versions of Character Map, you can
sort out quite a bit. Are there comparable tools for Mac? That'd be nice to
know.

> though he should still get the accents right). European Unicode fonts in
> Office 2004 include Times New Roman, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Century, Arial.
> Stick to those.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

Reply to this Message

Klaus Kamppeter - 23 Jun 2005 10:56 GMT

> I am suffering a rather weird error.
>
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>
> What Should I do?

I had the same problem between Office 2004 and on the PC-side with
Windows 2000 and Office 2000, pasting Excel charts as a graphic into a
Word document.

The workaround: avoid Arial and Times New Roman in Excel.

Crossplatform fonts that show up correctly on the windows-side are:
Verdana
Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Arial Narrow
Arial Black
Lucida Sans

With which version of Windows and Office do you have the problem?

Bye

Signature

----------------------------------------------------
Klaus Kamppeter klaus_usenet@wanadoo.es

Reply to this Message

Mac Forum / Applications / PowerPoint / June 2005

accentuated characters are mistaken when exchanging between Mac and PC