Over the past several years, users of eXtyles with Word 2003 have reported an occasional problem to Inera in which some text in a Word document would arbitrarily change from Roman to Greek letters during eXtyles operations.

Although there was no clear pattern when the problem would occur, it was seen most frequently in the last few paragraphs of documents (e.g., figure captions) when the documents had some Greek text in Symbol font at other locations in the file.

Inera had determined that this behavior was due to a bug in Microsoft Word 2003. We were able to obtain sample files that illustrated the bug to Microsoft independent of the use of eXtyles, and we are happy to announce that Microsoft has made a hot fix available.

Inera strongly recommends that all Word 2003 eXtyles users install this hot fix immediately.

The hot fix is available from Microsoft support and may be installed only after you have updated Word 2003 to service pack 2 (SP2). Once you have completed this update to Word 2003, you can obtain more information about the hot fix at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=910282, or you can contact Microsoft Support and ask for the hot fix specified in Knowledge Base article 910282. Contact information for Microsoft Support in your country can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=support.

Update as of October 2007: Microsoft has confirmed that the Greek bug fix has been rolled into SP3 for Office 2003. Although not yet listed in the SP3 documentation at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923618, they have indicated that this will be updated shortly.

Users of Word XP will also experience this problem, but Microsoft has not made a fix available for Word XP. Due to other stability issues, Inera does not recommend use of eXtyles with Word XP. Users of Word 2000 will not experience this problem and need not take any action.

Please feel free to contact Inera if you have questions.