I just moved all my files from an old Macbook running 10.6.8 to a newer (but still old) MacBook Air running El Capitan.
I have been using Baskerville as my default font on both computers; new computer has Word 2011, the other computer had an older version but I don’t remember which.
Starting yesterday, I noticed that some Word docs in Baskerville open up with gibberish–lots of boxes, mostly. I can recover the information by selecting all and changing the form–I’ve started using Times and made it the default just in case.
There does not seem to be any pattern to the problem–some old docs (pre-transfer) open up fine, some as gibberish; some new docs post-transfer open up fine, some as gibberish.
What’s going on? How can I fix? Is this a sign of malware?
Don’t have a Mac, but on a PC, a box is usually the character that is displayed when a particular character is not available in a given font. It’s likely your new computer doesn’t have all the same fonts your old computer had. As you say changing the font in the document fixes the things, this is almost certainly the problem.
I wold think that you should not have too much gibberish, unless your documents have accented characters, “smart” quotes (the curly kind not the straight kind you see here) or other less-than-standard characters.
When you change the font tell the computer you want the new font (Times Roman) to be the default for all new documents (for the default template. If you don’t know about templates don’t worry too much about it). This should prevent the problem from continuing, but won’t correct all the old files.
I think in the newest version of Word (not sure on Macs though) when you start a new document it will ask you how you want to start. Choose blank document; that should certainly use the default template I’d hope.
That makes sense, except that Baskerville does still work with some documents–that’s what makes me wonder if there is another issue. Word still gives me the option to use Baskerville as a font, but somewhat randomly it seems not to work.
There might be more than one “Baskerville” font, and that confuses Word.
On my system, I have a font family called “Garamond ITC T” and one called “Garamond”. i have some old documents were written on an older version of Word, on an older computer, with apparently different fonts installed. Occasionally I will try to edit one of those old documents, and it have complain that it doesn’t know what that font is – even though words on the next line are in that font. Possibly something like this is your problem?
Especially confusing because the space that shows the font name is not very big – sometimes it is truncated, and then I can’t see the difference between “Garamond ITC T” and “Garamond” – you have to put your cursor inside a word and click so that the full font name is displayed.