- #Word documents open with weird characters how to
- #Word documents open with weird characters software
What better way to spend the holidays than reviewing old work processes before launching a new project? I moved to UTF-8 ~7 years ago, which I still ‘use’–but I don’t have file-opening and file-saving steps which specify UTF-8 explicitly. In the early days, I limited us to using ASCII encoding, to ensure compatibility with 90s-era reading devices. I figure our EpubCheck and external 3rd parties checks of our product will catch anything bad. I don’t lose sleep over the possibility there are invisible oddities which occasionally make it thru. Then it becomes a case of identifying the unwanted character so we can include it in the Search & Replace. But there is still the occasional glitch which makes it thru to the final output files, where we catch it during a visual check. Maintained since, it’s worked very well, eliminating almost all the ‘dirty file’ problems which plagued our early efforts. Over a decade ago, I spent about a year developing VBA cleaning routines for incoming files.
#Word documents open with weird characters software
Of course, no way of keeping up with the hundreds of such devices, and the various software versions of each device, so we concentrate on EPUB2 file format, Kindle formats KF7 and KF8, and PDF–I’m happy if we get those right and pass associated validation checks. We output ebooks which need to be technically and aesthetically in good readable condition on as many electronic reading devices as possible. So I have no idea what OSs or OS languages or WPs or character encodings or fonts have been used in processing any file. We take in English language input from worldwide, which has typically gone thru a few people before reaching us.
#Word documents open with weird characters how to
My web searches on this get drowned out by explanations of how to hide or display the formatting marks in Word, so I haven’t been able to find anything useful.
![word documents open with weird characters word documents open with weird characters](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T3MqV.png)
I have been thru the IDPF and BISG sites, but not 100% of course. Ideally a resource produced by a sub-group of the IDPF, BISG or similar standards org, which would contain only the visible characters, and ideally a ‘common usage’ subset of those-who needs a table of over 1 million characters to check against? I know it’s a broad and vague question/quest, and a longshot, but maybe one of you experts here knows of such. Is there anywhere a table or list of characters which are “known good” for use in modern ebook readers? The idea being that such a resource could be used to compare against text files, to provide a warning if exceptions are found.