Thank you for this reply. You are correct this is a continuation of 730863.
I have now pursued the idea of using a hex dump tool to get the value of wingding characters. I must say that ‘graff’ also suggest this approach.
Looking at your results and what I found using the HexTookit (from the same stable as the hex dump tool od) I came to the conclusion the hex value for the ‘pencil’ (the ! using the wingding font) is 21F0.
Therefore I used the following Perl lines (2BF0 is an wingding envelope that started as a + character) on a Word document that contained a Wingding ‘pencil’.

$search-> {Text} = "\x{21F0}";
$replace-> {Text} ="\x{2BF0}";
$exec_res = $search-> Execute({Replace => wdReplaceAll});
[download]

Sadly this failed. Has any wise monk any idea of what I should try next?