This is a problem I've had with Word for Mac for some time now.
What I'd like to do is save some plain Japanese text from Word to a .txt file,
so that I can easily use it in other applications.
Text files have the advantage of being much smaller in size than other formats,
since extraneous formatting data is not saved along with the file.
Here are the steps I take:
1. Copy a block of text from Firefox and paste the text into Word 2008/2011, using the 'Keep text only' paste option.
2. Using 'Save as...', select the '.txt' file format, and click 'Save'.
3. In the file conversion dialog, select 'Other encoding' and 'Unicode 5.1-UTF8'
and click OK.
4. Close the file, and reopen the text file save in step 3 above in Word.
Select 'Convert from - Unicode Text' in the dialog, and select 'Unicode 5.1-UTF' in the
second options dialog.
The Japanese text is 100% garbled and unreadable in this case
when reading the text file back into Word, even though I had correctly selected
Unicode during each step of the process.
Ironically, however, other programs such as TextWrangler and TextEdit will
properly open the text file without garbling the Japanese characters.
It's Word itself that is garbling the document.
The only way that I can properly save files as text files in Japanese is to explicitly select 'Other encoding - Japanese (Mac OS)' or 'Other encoding - Japanese (Windows/DOS)' upon saving the file. However, when I load the same text file back in, I have to reload it using the Unicode setting. There seems to be no way to set the default encoding in Word for either save or open.
This all seems like a very roundabout, clumsy and non-intuitive way of simply saving the file in text format and reading it back in properly, which is all I want to do.
I'm not sure of all of the data-crunching and manipulation that is going on behind the scenes with Word in this case, but I am wondering if there is a solution to make this problem easier.
Thanks,
Jeff