I'm developing drawings in Visio 2003 that have a mixture of Arial and Symbol
font characters. I'm having two similar (and I suspect related) problems.

1. I'm occasionally collaborating with a person that only has Visio 2002.
When I save a version of the diagram in Visio 2002 format, it all of the
Symbol font characters revert to Arial font. So, the person I'm
collaborating with has to go and manually find and re-convert-back the Symbol
characters.

2. I'm putting together a report in Word (2000) that uses the Visio
drawings. Much to my surprise (and annoyance), the same Symbol font
characters get converted to Arial font when I paste into Word as an OLE
object. The only way I can get the Symbol font characters to remain in
Symbol font is if I do a Paste Special, and paste in as a Device Independent
Bitmap. This sucks for two reasons. First, bitmaps always paste in
"fuzzier" than an OLE object, and second, you lose the ability to
double-click and edit the object (the whole purpose of OLE in the first
place).

I know this is not a Word problem as I have Visio 2002 installed at home.
So I saved a copy of the drawings from Visio 2003 in Visio 2002 format. Of
course, the Symbol font characters reverted to Arial. I took the drawings
home, opened them in Visio 2002, restored the Symbol font characters and
re-saved the (Visio) files.

I then could copy from Visio into Word (at home I have Word 2002 vs the Word
2000 at work described above) as an OLE object and voila, the Greek
characters from the Symbol font were preserved.

This whole situation has been going on for a couple of months on this
project I'm working on, so I haven't described everything that leads me to
the conclusion that this is a Visio bug and not a Word (or other application)
bug.

Does anyone know if there's a fix for Visio that would solve this problem?
(That'd be the preferable approach.)

By the way... I have the same problem if I create a file with a mixture of
font types and even save it for the very first time as a Visio 2002 drawing.
I guess the only thing I haven't tried is to uninstall Visio 2003 and
reinstall it. It's getting down to that, or, reinstalling Visio 2002 -- I am
absolutely certain this problem didn't occur prior to my upgrading my work PC
to Visio 2003 (ie, didn't occur with Visio 2002).

Thanks.