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How to fix Chinese traditional font on the old word document to appear in the new Word

Soh 20 Reputation points
2025-08-25T08:53:52.4733333+00:00

Hi, as I upgrade to the new Office 2024, I opened my documents, change my fonts to traditional Chinese but the fonts doesn't auto change to Traditional Chinese but stay at Simplified Chinese font.

The new document are in traditional Chinese fonts which is prefect but not my old documents, I'm not able to have them in Traditional Chinese. Can you guide me what I should do? Is re-type the words the only way to resolve as I have many existing documents that I have in Chinese Traditional Font.

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  1. Crisss 2,395 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2025-08-25T17:18:37.4866667+00:00

    Hello!

    I'm Yasllame, a member of the OnDemand Expert community.

    I'm happy to help and clarify any questions.

    This happens because Word does not automatically convert characters that were originally typed in Simplified Chinese into Traditional Chinese just by changing the font. The font itself only displays the characters, but the conversion between Simplified and Traditional requires a text conversion tool, not just a style change.

    In Office 2024 Word (and also in earlier versions), there is a feature called Simplified/Traditional Chinese Conversion. To use it, open your document, go to Review > Language > Chinese Simplified/Traditional (it may appear as Chinese Simplified/Traditional Conversion), and select the desired conversion. This will transform characters already written in Simplified Chinese into Traditional Chinese, without the need to retype your text.

    Another option is to use the Language Conversion tool in Microsoft Editor or the Windows IME for Chinese. Windows also has a built-in option to automatically convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese within the input system, which can help when editing existing documents.

    Therefore, you don’t need to retype everything. You just need to use Word’s built-in conversion feature or the IME tool to convert the content of your old documents into Traditional Chinese.

    I hope this information was helpful! If you need anything else, I'm here.

    Sincerely,

    Yasllame

    Independent Specialist

    Subject: Talent LMS - Account Removed (If you believe your account was deactivated/deleted by mistake)

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    https://directly.talentlms.com/plus/my/courses/1009

    1 person found this answer helpful.

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  1. Xavier-D 7,590 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2025-08-25T13:29:18.7066667+00:00

    Hello Soh,

    Welcome to Microsoft Q&A

    Even if you manually change the font to a Traditional Chinese typeface, old documents may still display Simplified Chinese characters. This is because:

    • The original text was encoded or formatted using Simplified Chinese.
    • Office doesn’t automatically convert character sets—changing the font doesn’t change the character encoding.

    Here are a couple of solutions to fix without having to re-type the whole document in Simplified Chinese:

    Install Traditional Chinese Language Pack then replace the font in the old document

    Make sure your system has the Traditional Chinese language pack and fonts installed:

    • Go to Settings > Time & Language > Language.
    • Add Traditional Chinese and install the language pack.
    • Restart Office apps to ensure fonts are available.

    After the step above, now you use the batch-replace fonts font in Word:

    • Press Ctrl + H to open Find and Replace.
    • Click More > Format > Font.
    • In “Find what,” select the Simplified Chinese font.
    • In “Replace with,” select a Traditional Chinese font (e.g., MingLiU or PMingLiU).
    • Click Replace All.

    Another alternative solution is to convert Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese

    • Go to Review > Translate > Translate Document.
    • Choose Chinese (Simplified) to Chinese (Traditional).
    • This creates a new document with Traditional Chinese characters.

    I hope this help, feel free to reply back to this post if you need further assistance.

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    1 person found this answer helpful.

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