How to stop automatic conversion to SimSun?

[Tom Van Hauwaert]

I have developed a new encoding scheme in the private use area (PUA) of
Unicode. I also did create a font that contains the glyphs for these new
characters.

Now when selecting this font in Word and inserting characters from the PUA
range, Word automaticaly changes the font to SimSun. When using the Word
user interface, I can select the characters and change the font back to my
own font, and then these characters are displayed as I wish.

But now I am developing a C# application that automaticaly creates the
encoding table of my characters. That is a table that contains the character
code and the glyphs. Everything works fine, except that Word never uses my
own font to display the PUA characters, it always switches to SimSun. Is
there any way to change the font back to my own font using the program
interface?

Thanks,
Tom.

[Bob Eaton]

I can't count the number of times I've received this support question from
people in our organization (SIL)...

This is so serious of a problem in our organization that many people are
vigorously learning to code Open Source so we can modify Open Office.

Some solution absolutely must happen before Office 12 (we've been living
with it since Word 2000 and we keep buying the next version hoping that
it'll be fixed, but it hasn't yet!).

Please, please, please: if someone in the product group is listening, please
answer this and/or fix it before the next release.

FYI, it's not just SimSun. I have bonefide Devanagari range Unicode fonts
and styles set to use them for the 'complex script' font, but when I open up
an RTF file associated with such a style sheet, Word ignores the
Style-defined fonts and sets the text to Mangal (the default system font for
Devanagari as SimSun is for Chinese).

This also happens when I copy a table from one (open) Word document to
another and paste it to attach to another table. It seems Word ignores the
existing formatting and style and just tries to "determine" what the
language is (no doubt, by the Unicode range involved) and decides what the
font ought to be (ignoring existing formatting or style definitions).

And turning off the "language"->"automatically detect language" doesn't
help.

Please someone answer this,
Bob

Post by Tom Van Hauwaert
I have developed a new encoding scheme in the private use area (PUA) of
Unicode. I also did create a font that contains the glyphs for these new
characters.
Now when selecting this font in Word and inserting characters from the PUA
range, Word automaticaly changes the font to SimSun. When using the Word
user interface, I can select the characters and change the font back to my
own font, and then these characters are displayed as I wish.
But now I am developing a C# application that automaticaly creates the
encoding table of my characters. That is a table that contains the
character code and the glyphs. Everything works fine, except that Word
never uses my own font to display the PUA characters, it always switches
to SimSun. Is there any way to change the font back to my own font using
the program interface?
Thanks,
Tom.