Bullets from Word are appearing as rectangles

[cps-alex]

I am placing a long, heavily formatted Word doc in InDesign and everything looks great except the bullets are showing up as rectangles. When I highlight the bullets in Word it says "Symbol" as the font which I can also see is available in InDesign.

Does anyone have any idea why it's not working? Thanks

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Accepted solution]

The Symbol font used in the MS Word document is different from the one you have on your computer.

If the file came from MS Word / Windows, the default bullet character is character #186 on the TrueType Symbol font. 

Your computer or InDesign probably uses an OpenType version of the Symbol font where the default bullet character is Unicode #2022.

Just change your paragraph style that is formatting the bullets in InDesign to use InDesign's default bullet (it has a little red U on it, meaning it's Unicode, the one you want.

Or Find Fonts and replace the original Symbol with your Unicode Symbol font. Either method will clear up the problem.

[Prasannjeet31603644up5e]

Faced the same problem. The easiest solution here is to select your text, click on "Bulletpoints" button in the tool bar above in word. This will remove any existing bullet points from the text. Now click on the button again which will make the bullet points re-appear. This way the in-built bullet points symbol will be used by word, which will get converted appropriately in pdf. 

Now save the document as pdf again and hopefully now you won't see any bullet points anymore.