Wrong Characters Printed in Equations

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 17, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

Jakob uses the Equation Editor in one of his documents, and he's having problems printing the equation correctly. Instead of printing a Delta character in the equation, a picture of a small house is printed on his HP DeskJet. (It shows correctly on the screen, but prints incorrectly in the document.)

There are a couple of things to check. First of all, you'll want to make sure that the proper font definitions are set up in the Equation Editor:

Start the Equation Editor (insert a new equation or double-click an existing equation).
Choose Define from the Style menu. The Equation Editor displays the Styles dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Styles dialog box in the Equation Editor.

Make sure that the L.C. Greek, U.C. Greek, and Symbol drop-downs are all set to Symbol.
Click OK.

If this doesn't fix the printing problem, there is a good chance that something is messed up with your printer driver; either the driver is not installed fully or the driver is performing some inappropriate font substitutions. To test if this is the case, take the document to a different system, preferably one that uses a different printer. If the document prints correctly on that system, then you might try removing the printer driver and reinstalling it on your system.

If the problem persists, contact the good folks at Design Science. They are the creators of the Equation Editor, and they assure WordTips readers that they will be very responsive to any technical support issues such as this. Send your problem to support@dessci.com for the fastest response.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (243) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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