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gerlis

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Foreign characters dont display in Word

A customer has just got a new Win 7 PC with Office 2010.  He previously had XP with, I think, Office 2003.  
He sometimes needs to produce documents and flyers using mostly English, but with the odd word or two in Hebrew.  He did this by installing some Hebrew fonts.  Because it was only a few words, it was not necessary to install Hebrew language on his PC or to get a Hebrew keyboard as he knew which keys represented which Hebrew characters.
He did this by just keying in the letters that he knew would represent the Hebrew characters he needed and then just selected the text and changed the selection to the Hebrew font.
With his new setup, this no longer works.  If he selects the Hebrew font, the selected text remains in the original English font.  If he tries to change it to another English font, this works OK.
I have tried this on my computer - also Windows 7 and also Office 2010 - and I have the same problem.  Strangely, I found that some of the Hebrew fonts work in Notepad, whilst others don’t.  Very odd.
Any idea what's going on, and how to resolve it?
He doesn’t want to purchase a Hebrew word processor such as DavkaWriter or Dagesh-Pro,as his usage doesn’t warrant it. He doesn’t want to install Hebrew language on his PC unless it’s the only way.  
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Interactii

Have you tried using MS UI Gothic as the font in Word and seeing if it displays correctly? Also, go to http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99 and copy some text from that site and paste it in and see if it displays okay. This could be a problem with the way Hebrew text was encoded in the past versus how it is encoded in modern operating systems.

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ASKER

Apologies for the long delay.  Hebrew text that was cut and pasted from the Wikipedia article into Word 2010 worked perfectly.  MS UI Gothic also displays as expected.

If I type abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, select it, and change the font to the David font, it stays the same.  If I select the text again and change the font to any other English font, it changes.  I also noticed that the font shows as the previously selected font on the Word Ribbon, so it looks as though Word is ignoring the change when it sees the Hebrew font.

This prompted me to try the same exercise with Notepad and to my surprise, the David, and the other Hebrew fonts, didnt even show in the font list.  

I know that this used to work in previous versions of Windows with previous versions of Office.

I looked at Control Panel > Fonts > David and noticed that the Font Family details showed up in Hebrew but, the Font Preview showed up in English characters.  I also unticked the option Hide fonts based on language settings.

This makes me think that MS have changed the behaviour of foreign language characters and, if this is the case, I would love to know how to turn the font behavior back to how it used to be.

Thanks
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gerlis

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