Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I'm not...probably...going to send in this application, nor am I asking for any assistance, but I'm just wondering: those of you that were curious to pick it up, are you finding the Wingdings remarkably averse to being switched over to a readable font? I don't know if it's my Word program or not, but if I want to know what any of the questions are I have to manually decode them. Which, I'm getting pretty good at decoding, and it's definitely something to do on a Tuesday night, but I think I might be being stupid about it.

I almost don't want to know the answer. Because it's not like I'm going to be doing things any differently. It's probably not even like I'll bother answering the questions once I know what they are. But I'm curious if I'm as stupid as I suspect.

link to question and application referenced

I couldn't figure out the wingdings, either. (And I'm not planning on applying either--I'm happily married, but I was also just curious.)

i put it in calibri, which was quite readable.

did you all find the "surprise" at the end?

Hmmm...what version of word are you using, Imogen? I've tried it on 2007 and 2010, neither of which will work in calibri.

I wrote this before I saw Imogen's post: I figured out a way to decode it....partially. I won't post anything here, so if you're interested in knowing what I did, PM me and I'll tell you.

I also tried, just for fun. I wanted to know what was different about his app than others. (I'm also happily married.) And I also had more trouble getting it out of Wingdings. But I thought perhaps it was because I was using Pages instead of Word. And I didn't care enough to keep trying.

Of course I found the secret special part! I found that first!

And I just finished manually decoding it, so I don't need the help, but thanks.
(Now what am I supposed to do the rest of the evening?)

I thought it was fun. You have to change it to one of the more readable "symbol-based" fonts, although I started a manual decode. I also found the hidden part (I almost deleted it!) and I have filled the application out completely. I have not, however, sent it in. I may do so in the future, however.

Also, I first opened it on my phone and I got a bunch of squares and I thought you would have to fill all the squares in with your random ramblings such that they stayed in the character limit.

I was able to read it, but it involved a hex editor. I'm guessing that wasn't the "correct" solution, but I'm not sure what was. Changing to other fonts didn't help.

Encoding schemes like US-ASCII assign numbers to characters, like 0x41 to 'A', while fonts map characters to glyphs, whether they be bitmaps or scalable outlines. Most charsets assign the same numbers to the range of upper and lower case Latin letters and the digits 0-9, but there are probably some that don't. Some fonts have images for characters your charset may not have a mapping for, which would mean you had no way to even type it using that charset, and some fonts have nothing for a character in the encoding scheme's charset, which would mean when you typed that character, you'd probably see either a blank space or a square.

Wingdings charset

Haha, the secret portion made me cringe horribly until I decided he was being satirical. Cheers to BYU stereotypes!

Is 12 a reference to Elder Maxwell's last devotional at BYU? Or did you see this phrase elsewhere Appleton?

EDIT: For those who are having a tough time getting the font to show up, you can cut/paste into Notepad. Notepad removes all formatting and pastes everything as Courier.

I tried cutting and pasting into Notepad, but it still didn't give me anything readable. Maybe it just doesn't like Word 2010?

It finally worked when I copied it into WordPad and changed the font to ArialUnicode MS. Who'd have thunk?
(So much for saving time by copying into another program and changing the font-- it probably would have been faster to just manually decode the thing!)

I certainly feel more of a sense of accomplishment for decoding it myself. Especially when I got to the point where I could start predicting what word would come next.

I saw that it was a docx file and didn't even try to open it.