Word 2004 is an interesting program. :-) Now that Endnote 8 is available, I can finally use it for my work (or perhaps I should say that now I can be used by Word 2004).

I’m looking forward to the SP2 version.

Personally, I am not getting too excited about SP2 — if it ever arrives. If SP1 is any indication, very little will be fixed. Can Microsoft afford not to fix such obvious, blatant bugs? Based on SP1, they can… So why would they fix them in SP2? They obviously have different priorities than the rest of us.

I just issued a bug-fix request with all of these observations using the Help/Send Feedback on Word menuchoice. Here’s hoping that this will be fixed soon.

At present, the only workaround is to type without issuing the option_space keystroke in the stream of typed characters, then go back and manually select a space character and then type option_space.

Here’s one more curiosity; if one selects the non-breaking character, it is not possible to apply a previously defined character style to it and see the font change to the intended font. So the option_space character itself is infected; this is a problem with Word 2004′s character mapping that probably involves the new Unicode stuff (which has other problems, as you and others have noted).

At this point, I am using an Autocorrect entry to insert the option space. All you have to do is type an option_space keystroke, select the non-breaking space character, and then define an Autocorrect item to have it be inserted where needed in a stream of typed characters. I’ve tested this and find that after inserting the non-breaking space, the typeface that was being used prior to the non-breaking space is still in force. (But on my system, that non-breaking space is in the Sand typeface–it looks like the correct font metric for the typeface in force is used, however, so it looks like this will be an acceptable situation.)

Another work-around is, of course, to compose in a TrueType font and then change the font to the desired Postscript font once everything has been typed. (Using a style-based approach, you just have to change the style definition of the main style on which all your other styles are based.) I would tend to prefer that approach.

So that’s why I am using the PostScript fonts for now.

Still, I don’t think I want to deal with the non-breaking space bug rather than this screen corruption. I type too much French stuff that requires non-breaking spaces all over the place.

I think that the Unicode support in Word 2004 is the problem with the speed of screen response that everyone notes in moving from Word v.X to 2004. The Unicode stuff must be layered on top of the old code, so there are routines gumming up the works that do the font mapping. As we have noted (above) there are a number of manifestations of problems with the font mapping with respect to Unicode.

Still, having the Unicode stuff is a step forward. I recently wrote a paper using FrameMaker in which I found it impossible (using the old Mac 8-bit font system) to type a number of special characters that have to do with “foreign” languages, especially with respect to author names in the bibliography. (For instance, I think that it is impossible to type an i with an accent grave (i.e. an accent pointing to the left as it goes up) using the old Mac fonts. But on windows, which has had unicode support for a longer time, there is no problem with an i accent grave. I had trouble communicating with the journal that published the paper the proper way to accent that i. With Word 2004 this is not going to be a problem any more, but it will be some time (if ever) before all of the bugs in the Unicode support have been worked out fully.