Equation Editor in Microsoft Office and Leopard

I use the Equation Editor in MS Office 2004 for typing equations. Last week I upgraded to Leopard. Now when I use the Equation Editor I get some unexpected results. For example, putting a "dot" over a character results in "<<" over the character.

Since these problems appeared, I have performed a complete re-install of Office 2004 (with first moving the old Office 2004 and Microsoft-related .plist files to Trash) and performed all of the Office 2004 upgrades up to 11.3.9. No change -- the problem persists.

In contacting Microsoft, they focused in on the source as being problems with the system fonts and not problems with Office.

Has anyone else had these types of font problems since upgrading to Leopard?

Thanks.

Intel Mini, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Nov 25, 2007 11:55 AM

Reply
43 replies

Nov 27, 2007 4:52 AM in response to Kendrick Kay

Kendrick,

Thanks. I removed the MT Extra font from the Library. This almost solved all of the problems. The equation now looks fine in the editor; however, when the editor is closed and the equation appears in the Word document, it is not correct (it looks just like it did earlier in the editor before removing MT Extra). However, reopening and reclosing the Equation Editor with that equation produces a perfect equation in Word. Did you have this after you removed the font?

Thank you very much for your help.

Jan 14, 2008 12:37 AM in response to IsaacN

I am having the same problem. To me, it looks like a screen refresh issue. Delta signs frequently disappear or sometimes become an exclamation mark! A minus sign can become = or # or it simply disappears. Parentheses can become distorted or partially inverted. Frequently refreshing in Word by going a page up and then back can sometimes get the proper equation, but, more often than not, it is messed up. Building equations in text style reduces but does not eliminate the errors. I have the same issues with equation editor in PowerPoint. Never had these problems with OS 10.4. Problems are so severe that I can't use equation editor. In fact, I may not be able to use Office for producing teaching materials for my courses.

Jan 14, 2008 11:46 PM in response to baltwo

I have what appears to be the same problem: a file created with Word in MS Office 2004 (in Tiger) containing equations written in Equation Editor, where the equations now appear in corrupted form: minus signs disappear, the greek letter lambda appears as #, although the greek letter mu appears fine. When I double-click the equations they appear correctly in the equation editor window. But embedded in the document they are corrupted and they print with the errors showing on paper.

I emailed the file to someone who has a Windows computer. They can open it fine and print it fine. I downloaded it from my email web browser at home, opened it on my home computer (iMac G5 also running Leopard) and it appears fine and prints fine. So I am no longer sure it's a Leopard issue. But it may be that font files have been changed somehow on my intel MacBook.

Any suggestions? I don't know what Font Book is.

Jan 15, 2008 3:45 PM in response to baltwo

I used "validate font" for Symbol.dfont and found that it had a "minor problem" reported as a duplicate font. However, I didn't know how to reinstall it. So I searched for other articles about font problems and found a macworld article which recommended removing the file ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache. I did and restarted the MacBook (after running disk utility).

Hey presto! Everything now works with equations in my word document!

Thanks for your suggestions.

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Equation Editor in Microsoft Office and Leopard

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