An issue may occur with documents created by Microsoft Word when using the “Smart Quotes” auto-correction feature. Microsoft will insert Unicode versions of quote, apostrophe, dash, and bullet characters. This displays well on Microsoft systems with the appropriate fonts, but the document tends to display with boxes for those characters on Unix because those Unicode characters are not in the fonts on that system. Also, some RTF and MS Word documents may word wrap incorrectly after an apostrophe. For example, the word member’s may display as member at the end of a line and the s would display at the beginning of the next line.

The current version of the MS Office option for RasterMaster Java does not include the special handling needed to treat smart quotes correctly. A future version of RasterMaster Java should resolve this issue.

Until the issue is resolved in RasterMaster Java, you can resolve this issue by disabling “Smart Quotes” in Microsoft when creating documents. Specific instructions differ depending on your MS Word version. If you Google for disable Microsoft Word smart quotes, you will find how to do this for your version of MS Word.

To create a document that displays better on Unix systems, please follow the steps below:

  1. Open the document in MS Word.
  2. Make sure that Smart Quotes are disabled if they are not already.
  3. Select the character that is not displaying properly or do a search replace/all for that character.
  4. Insert the equivalent ASCII character using Insert >Symbol.
  5. Save the document.