Compatibility issue with MS Office - font related.

[JKT]

Another FYI on fonts as a warning.

Rather annoyingly I recently had to send my CV to a company as a .doc formatted file rather than in my preferred .pdf format*. Obviously, rather than using MS Office, which I didn't actually have at the time I started it, I had generated my CV in NeoOfficeJ. OK, I thought, just export it as a .doc file and after checking it in MS Office 2004, send it off. Did that, and unfortunately this is where the following font compatibility issue reared its ugly head... I used Futura and Gill Sans as the fonts for my CV as both are nice, modern, clean and easily readable fonts when viewed in both print and onscreen.

In NOJ's font menu, each style of Futura is listed as a completely separate font (i.e. Futura Medium, Futura Condensed, Futura Medium Italic, etc) and likewise Gill Sans. So I pick the appropriate font style and apply it to the various sections using the Stylist feature of NOJ/OOo.

However, in MS Office 2004, the differing styles for each font all fall under the one heading (e.g. Futura for all the Futura styles). This leads to a problem - Office can't recognise the "Futura Medium" style assigned by NOJ as being the "medium" style of Futura and instead performs a font substitution. Likewise for Gill Sans Bold Italic. The end result - my NOJ .doc export is badly mis-formatted in Word 2004 and is using completely the wrong fonts throughout! Ugh.

There was a simple solution to this - you can set Font substitution preferences in MS Office to use the right fonts in each document, but this was/is obviously a bit tedious. There is also no guarantee that people receiving your document will know how to do this either, so be aware that they might not see what you sent them!

I am assuming that this is not something that can be solved in NOJ itself - I assume that the way fonts are listed or assigned is an OOo feature rather than one from NOJ?

* And christ, is that damned annoying or what? It occurred to me after I had submitted it, that even having gone through the hassle of reformatting my CV so that it looked OK in Office 2004, I have no guarantee that the person who looks at it in Office XXXX for whatever machine they have (most likely a Windows PC) is going to be able to view my CV in the way I designed it anyway, as they most likely won't have the correct fonts on their system either! In older versions of Office I seem to remember being able to embed Fonts into your documents as you saved them so that they could be viewed by anyone as they should look, even if they didn't have the font, but I can't find that option anywhere in Office 2004... guess I probably won't be getting that job then

Btw, CV is Curriculum Vitae which is the British equivalent of the Resumé in the US.

[OPENSTEP]

While I don't have any insight into the font situation at present (some of it is how Java handles fonts IIRC but am a bit too tired of editing startup scripts to have good coherency right now...) the need to submit as a Word doc is interesting.

Frequently headhunters or other subcontracting agencies will require submissions in .doc format rather then PDF. Sometimes this is so they can concatenate multiple CVs into a single document to send to agencies. Frequently, however, it is so they can actually edit out all of the contact information for the candidate to prevent the company from contacting promising individuals directly (and thus potentially lose their headhunting fee).

I suppose real companies may want to do the contact info blocking, but I've not encountered it that much.

For fonts, I just tend to stick to Times New Roman/Courier so haven't run into the italics issues as much.

ed

[sardisson]

Curious...I was trying to think of a valid reason for anyone to need an editable version of one's résumé....

As for the font thing, what happens to the fonts when you open the .doc in Text Edit? Are they correct there?

Similarly, if you make a new document in Text Edit, save as .doc, and open in Word?

Smokey

[JKT]

In TextEdit and Pages, the NOJ exported .doc file is opened with the font settings the same as they were in the original NOJ document, with the exception of a single font substitution (Futura Condensed ExtraBold is swapped for Futura Condensed Medium for some reason), so they do a far, far better job than MS Office. I won't comment on their attempt at the formatting of the rest of the document though

Incidentally, AbiWord makes an even bigger hash of it than Office...

[sardisson]

[JCG]

[sardisson]