Coding errors in Microsoft Word

Curiously, when using Microsoft Word processor in Windows to create quite usual text documents (.doc and .docx), the normal/bold fonts do not always get expressed as they should. This anomaly regards (i) the very common Times New Roman font, (ii) certain symbols (iii) certain font size classes. These properties are present in my current version (Microsoft Office Word 2007) and also appeared in my previous version of Word.

Mostly the errors are expressed in that the symbols are not in bold front when they should be. However, though the command is 'normal', the hyphen (-) is bold in the font size 14 and onwards. The wrong font expressions of the hyphen are perhaps the most commonly occurring ones.

The same phenomenon is present in, at least, my old but still functioning version of Microsoft FrontPage (most probably version 11 of the year 2003), a program to create web contents. This could be expected as a simplified version of Microsoft Word (the "Normal" mode) is one of the two ways to create text in this program (the other is to write in HTML language).

In FrontPage, when viewing the text in the "HTML" mode, it can bee seen that the tags ('b' either on or off) are consistent with the Word commands of the "Normal" mode, i.e. in certain cases inconsistent with the actual appearance of the symbol.

Besides Word documents, the erroneous coding is -- though a bit differently -- seen in the text of my website. I have not tried to trace possible errors in printed text; autocorrecting programs may at least partly prevent their emergence. Obviously, this erroneous coding is not harmful in practice. It is merely annoying, as one could expect this vast company to present a perfect text creating program.

Below, I give the results of my observations.

Some symbols in Times New Roman font