I have just tried to reopen some Word 97 files not used since a change of computer from Windows 98 to XP. I get a page of open squares with occasional letters shown. Eric Liggett
When Word opens a document, it uses the type font specified or, if you don't have it, the closest it can find. Each character is represented by a number, which Word looks up in a codepage table. When it can't find a character, it replaces it with a small blank square.
This problem is particularly common when opening Chinese and Cyrillic documents. In this case, it suggests that either there was a problem with your original font - for example, you used a custom or non-standard font - or you now have a fault in XP. If not, the documents are probably corrupt. Try opening them on someone else's PC. If that works, you can re-save them as .txt and .rtf files.
I have oversimplified things here. Word 97 was the first version of Word to use Unicode to encode rich text in 16-bit characters, like Windows NT/2000/XP, but Windows 98 still used 8-bit ASCII (or ANSI) characters. For technical details, see Peter Constable's paper, Unicode Issues in Word 97 and Word 2000. (You can download the 532K PDF white paper directly here.)
Backchat: Barry Moore says to try loading the files in Microsoft's free Word 97 file viewer, then copying the whole text and pasting it into another word processor. "It works for me, anyway!"
