Reply To: Problem with the paragraph.contents property

I didn’t mention what the original task was. I have to copy the exact text content of some paragraphs from a book into an InDesign table, then export this table into an RTF file for further processing by other experts. The book is 620 pages long and there are an average 5-10 such paragraphs on a page so I decided to do it by a script. The problem is that some characters that were borrowed from a font named Zapf Dingbat didn’t go through.

Later I modified the above script to the following:

myParagraph.duplicate( bla…bla);

and then at the destination I removed all unnecessary formattig from it. This way those characters didn’t disappear. But after exporting I had to realize that although in InDesign I saw those characters, in Word they disappeared again. This time they were simple Arial glyphs, so their Dingbat past was gone.

The book was originally typeset in London, and as I investigated the whole, I saw they used 3 diffferent Zaph Dingbats fonts throughout the book:

ZapfDingbats PostScript (unknown)
ZapfDingbatsITC TrueType (unknown)
ZapfDingbatsStd OpenType (Adobe_OT_Library)

I don’t know where they got these fonts, and why they used 3 different instances for the same purpose but I may not change it. I think all 3 are some illegal copy or modified somehow. But why they didn’t work after the text has already been formatted to Arial?