To keep my documents away from prying eyes at the office, I saved some of them in the Wingdings font that turns each letter into some kind of graphic symbol like an asterisk, arrow or a Greek letter. Later I was able to convert it back from Wingdings to New Times Roman or another readable font.

At home I was trying to protect my document from other spying eyes and thought I would save the document in Marlett font. Unfortunately, now I am unable to convert it back to Times New Roman or any readable font. Can you help?

-Sue Hendricks hotmail.com

You stumbled into a land mine with that particular font to replace letters in a document with gobbledygook, Ms. H.

The strange markings that Marlett displays are used not to make visible symbols like those Wingdings but rather to handle elements of the Windows screen display like scroll bars, buttons, arrows and such. When one selects all the text in the Times Roman font and then uses the Format/Font command to translate them into Marlett, they can only be translated back into Times Roman as a meaningless small empty box for every letter.

The good news is that some other Microsoft fonts used for bookkeeping can be used to make a Times Roman-to-Marlett transfer recoverable. For example, if you select all of the characters in Marlett and then translate them into the boldface cursive Microdot format, they will be legible again.

That not only fixes your problem, Ms. H., but also gives you an additional code trick to frustrate prying eyes.

I have a new Dell Pentium 4 operating on Windows XP and I have lost my icons on the opening desktop screen and do not know how to restore them. Can you help me?

-John Blaney aol.com

A. You will notice that if you give the cursor arrow icon a right-click while hovering over that blank desktop screen a menu of commands will pop up. At the top is one for Arrange Icons. Move the arrow to that and it will open up a set of choices that include one called “Show Desktop Icons.” Click that line to place a check mark alongside it and then sit back as your hard drive churns a bit and the desktop gets redrawn with the icons intact.

It is worth adding that this check mark should be in place by default and so something you did must have changed it. It also is worth adding that many people are glad to learn about this ability to toggle the desktop icon display because it can be another handy tool to shield what you are doing from the view of passers-by.

Contact Jim Coates via e-mail at jcoatestribune.com or via snail mail at the Chicago Tribune, Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago IL 60611.

Questions can be answered only through this column. Add your point of view at www.chicagotribune.com/askjim.)