Font issues with Word docs from PCs

We are a scientific publishing company that uses almost exclusively Macs. There has always been a few problems in the past with opening word docs that were created on the PC. Most manuscripts that we receive from authors have mathmatic equations formulas with different symbols or greek letters. Sometimes these symbols wouldn't appear properly. We would then open the docs on our lone PC (NT4), print out the docs, note the differences and then correct them on-screen on the Mac. Recently however it seems that every word doc from PC land has this problem and it adds so much time and effort to go through the above described process for each manuscript that comes in. We tried out Word 2004 to see if it would solve/help the problem but it doesn't. Does this have something to do with Macs not supporting embedded fonts in word docs? Anybody else having this problem? Any suggestions?

nitz