Interesting Find - Symbol and Numbered Lists

While preparing for my course launch last week, I stumbled across an interesting find that I thought I'd share with the community.

I had a numbered list.

In one of the elements in this list, I used the symbol of "increase" as the first character.

In other elements the symbol of "increase" was used in the sentence but not as first character.

I published the file

FINDING = The symbol was all distorted when it was the first character in the numbered list.  All other occurrences of this symbol were absolutely fine.

I was perplexed at this.  Then I added "THE" in front of this symbol such that it was no longer the first character, and now it published just fine.  (See image below & the attached powerpoint file).

So my lesson learned - Never use "SYMBOL" as first character in numbered lists.

Why did it happen - I do not know.  Any ideas?