31. A machine-readable storage device encoded with a computer program product comprising instructions operable to cause a programmable processor to: identify in a document a first character, wherein the first character is a recognized non-alphabetic character that is ambiguous because it can be represented by more than one character code in an output file that is interpretable by a word processing application; identify a string of characters including the first character, wherein the string begins with the character that follows the first blank space preceding the first character and ends with the character that precedes the first blank space that follows the first character; create a set of candidate solutions from the string of characters, wherein each solution in the set comprises one or more sub-strings created by representing the first character with a unique one of the more than one character codes that can represent the first character; search a dictionary stored on a computer storage device for the one or more sub-strings in each of the solutions in the set of candidate solutions; and to use the dictionary search results to determine which one of the more than one character codes should be used to represent the first character in the output file; and to write the character code to the output file.
31. A machine-readable storage device encoded with a computer program product comprising instructions operable to cause a programmable processor to: identify in a document a first character, wherein the first character is a recognized non-alphabetic character that is ambiguous because it can be represented by more than one character code in an output file that is interpretable by a word processing application; identify a string of characters including the first character, wherein the string begins with the character that follows the first blank space preceding the first character and ends with the character that precedes the first blank space that follows the first character; create a set of candidate solutions from the string of characters, wherein each solution in the set comprises one or more sub-strings created by representing the first character with a unique one of the more than one character codes that can represent the first character; search a dictionary stored on a computer storage device for the one or more sub-strings in each of the solutions in the set of candidate solutions; and to use the dictionary search results to determine which one of the more than one character codes should be used to represent the first character in the output file; and to write the character code to the output file. 33. The computer program product encoded on the machine-readable storage device of claim 31 , wherein the dictionary search fails to find all of the one or more sub-strings in any of the solutions in the set of candidate solutions, further comprising instructions to prompt a user to manually enter the character code that represents the first character.