WD97: Characters Appear as Square Boxes in Printed Document

ID: Q159418

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Word 97 for Windows

IMPORTANT: This article contains information about editing the registry. Before you edit the registry, make sure you understand how to restore it if a problem occurs. For information about how to do this, view the "Restoring the Registry" Help topic in Regedit.exe or the "Restoring a Registry Key" Help topic in Regedt32.exe.

SYMPTOMS

If you print a document containing extended characters, such as Greek symbols, to certain printers using printer drivers that do not accept Unicode characters, the extended characters are printed as square boxes even though they are displayed correctly on the screen.

The problem affects the following printers and printer drivers:

Canon BubbleJet BJ-C600, 4000, 4200, 4500, 4550, v 3.40

Canon Multipass 2500 3.40

Epson Color 500

Epson Stylus Color, v 2.x

Epson Stylus Pro / XL v. 2.11BE

HP Color LaserJet 5 PCL, printer driver version F 1.300

HP DeskJet 1600C, printer driver version 4.20

HP LaserJet 4 PCL, printer driver version 3.78

HP LaserJet 6P, standard printer driver

Okidata 4 laser printer

CAUSE

This problem occurs because these printer drivers do not provide support for Unicode characters.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, use any of the following methods.

Method 1: Set a Print Flag

There is a flag (registry setting) for the printer driver that causes it to use American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character layout functions instead of Unicode character layout functions. When set correctly, this flag allows the printer driver to print the extended characters correctly. To set this flag, use the method appropriate for your version of Word.

WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

For information about how to edit the registry, view the "Changing Keys and Values" Help topic in Registry Editor (Regedit.exe) or the "Add and Delete Information in the Registry" and "Edit Registry Data" Help topics in Regedt32.exe. Note that you should back up the registry before you edit it. If you are running Windows NT, you should also update your Emergency Repair Disk (ERD).

Microsoft Word 97 Service Release 1 (SR-1):

If you have installed Microsoft Word 97 Service Release 1 (SR-1), you can set one registry entry that applies to all installed printers. If you have the original (non-SR1) version of Word 97, see the "Word 97 (Non-SR1) Version" section later in this article instead.

To set the registry entry, follow these steps:

On the Start menu, click Run.

In the Open box, type regedit and then click OK.

Locate the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Word\Options

Double-click the Options key to open it.

With the Options key selected, on the Edit menu, point to New and click String Value.

In the right pane, type NoWideTextPrinting, and press ENTER.

With NoWideTextPrinting selected, on the Edit menu, click Modify.

In the Value Data box, type the value 1 and click OK.

On the Registry menu, click Exit, and then restart Word.

For additional information about SR-1, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q172475 OFF97: How to Obtain and Install MS Office 97 SR-1

Word 97 (Non-SR1) Version:

If you have not yet installed Word 97 Service Release 1, but have the original (non-SR1) version of Word 97, follow these steps:

On the Start menu, click Run.

In the Open box, type regedit and then click OK.

Locate the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\8.0\Word

Double-click the Word key to open it.

Under the Word key, click to select your printer name.

NOTE: If your printer name is not displayed under the Word key, then follow these steps:
1. On the Registry menu, click Exit.
2. Start Word.
3. On the File menu, click Print. Under Printer, select your printer in the Name list, and then click the Close button (the "x" on the right side of the title bar). If the appropriate printer is already selected, then click Cancel.
4. On the Tools menu, click Options.
5. Click the Print tab, and then click OK.
6. Start method 1 again at step 1.

With the printer key selected, on the Edit menu, point to New, and click String Value.

In the right pane, type Flags, and press ENTER.

With Flags selected, on the Edit menu, click Modify.

In the Value box, type 8192 and click OK.

The printer should now print the extended characters correctly.

Method 2: Printer-Specific Workarounds

The following information describes workarounds that are available for specific printer drivers. Note that not all printer drivers may have a specific workaround (in this case, method 1 is the only available workaround).

HP DeskJet 1600C:

To work around this problem, follow these steps:

On the Start menu, point to Settings, and then click Printers.

Click the HP DeskJet 1600C ColorSmart printer icon.

On the File menu, click Properties.

In the HP DeskJet 1600C ColorSmart Properties dialog box, click the Details tab, and then click the Setup button.

In the ColorSmart Setup dialog box, click the Advanced button.

In the Advanced dialog box, select "Use LaserJet III font scaling" and click OK to close each of the open dialog boxes.

HP LaserJet 4 Series PCL:

To work around this problem, follow these steps:

On the Start menu, point to Settings, and then click Printers.

Click the HP LaserJet 4 printer icon.

On the File menu, click Properties.

From the HP LaserJet 4 Properties dialog box, click the Fonts tab.

In the Fonts dialog box, under TrueType fonts, select "Print TrueType as graphics" and click OK.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

MORE INFORMATION

ASCII characters are represented by the values 0 to 127; ANSI includes ASCII but adds characters 128 through 255. In all languages, the ASCII characters are exactly the same, but characters 128-255 are used for characters specific to a language, based on the code page associated with the language. This approach handles the character differences for most languages in the world.

Some languages (specifically, East Asian languages such as Japanese Kanji, several dialects of Chinese, and Korean) cannot be represented with only 256 characters. The written characters in these languages are entire words rather than individual letters, so there are typically over 6000 different characters.

Unicode was introduced to handle these languages. Unicode uses two bytes per character, instead of the standard one byte per character.

For additional information, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q159471 Word 97: How to Install the Far East Support Files

Q99884 Unicode and Microsoft Windows NT

Q130052 Ideas to Remember as You Convert from ASCII or ANSI to Unicode

DeskJet 1600C, LaserJet 4, and Color LaserJet 5 are manufactured by Hewlett-Packard, a vendor independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding this product's performance or reliability.

For additional information on how to obtain technical support for Microsoft products if you are outside the United States, contact the Microsoft subsidiary for your area.

To locate your subsidiary, see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q49868 Microsoft International Subsidiary Technical Support

Additional query words: 8.0 8.00 dj1600c hpclj5 hplj4 ACTT Russian Greek Cyrillic foreign symbol font SR1 release

Keywords : kbenv kbprint kbdta winword word97
Version : WINDOWS:97
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbbug