Macro for converting Unicode into ASCII?

I was just reminded that someone sent me a MSWord macro written by John Kendall for converting BWGRKL text into Unicode Palatino Linotype.

Well now John has just posted an even better macro than the one he sent me months ago! (See the next post!) This macro is much better than the one I posted earlier as it "picks out" what text in any document is Bwgrkl.ttf and converts it, leaving the rest of your document change free! It also catches errors and marks them with "marching red ants!"

Thanks Mark! :D

Thanks John! :D

I have removed the old version. Go to the next post to download the new version!

Hi Jim,

Since I sent you this, I've been wondering whether you were ever going to post it! I assumed that you had something more sophisticated in mind. ;) I've attached a slightly updated version.

I've no real knowledge of anything but the most elementary of macros and the simple series of search & replace procedures in this macro looks a bit clunky to me. I'm sure that there ought to be a more elegant way of doing it. It includes some odd instructions to cover common mistakes among students in their use of the bwgrkl font.

The macro is very fully commented so that it should be easy to identify anything that folk need to modify, though this does make it rather large. For instance, it's easy to do a search and replace on the macro to make it use the Unicode font of your choice.

It also contains a trap for any bwgrkl characters that are not converted to Unicode (the errant characters are marked with 'marching red ants', but it's easy to modify this to your own taste).

Please let me know if you find any errors or if you come up with some improvements.

God bless,

John
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John Kendall
Cardiff
Wales

If it's any use to anyone, there's also this macro that I cobbled together for converting Unicode Greek to Bwgrkl. It doesn't cover all the characters in the BW font (e.g. numerals, text critical signs etc) and was written in a hurry using the previous macro as its basis. However, it seems to do what I need for manipulating Word documents with biblical Greek texts.

I haven't tested it extensively, so again please let me know if you find any errors or if you come up with some improvements.

Oops! I'm not sure I should have submitted this. I originally wrote this macro as a quick and dirty fix for converting some documents with a mixture of English and Unicode Greek text with precomposed accents & diacritics. To avoid messing up the English text, I didn't convert the punctuation characters. Also, the apostrophe ( ' ) is used as elision mark in some Unicode Greek texts (e.g. those on Perseus), whereas the bwgrkl font uses V both as an elision mark and as a smooth breathing before initial uppercase vowels. The macro does not convert characters such as this to bwgrkl.

The non-functional subroutine "DontUse" at the end of the macro flags up the issue for further consideration & modification. If you simply want to convert a file consisting only of Unicode Greek or selected Unicode Greek text, you should be able to edit it appropriately. I just don't have time to play around with it right now.

The version I posted earlier doesn't convert a lone diaeresis. I've fixed this. There may be other issues.

John
--
John Kendall
Cardiff
Wales

The Bwgrkl to Unicode macro worked superbly! As mentioned by other posts the Unicode to Bwgrkl macro has some issues with accents and breathing marks, but those are minor issues, and I'm sure someone will post a newer and improved version before too long!

This seems to be a Word XP problem I'm having, I don't know if there's something I can do to undo it, but I'm having trouble getting the smooth breathing mark and grave accent to show up in Word. For instance, if I set the font to BWGrkL and just start typing greek if I try to type the string "w'n" it will appear like this: w'n and not like the "w'n" it's supposed to.... anybody know what would cause that?? Otherwise the macro works very nicely.

Mike

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Michael Hanel

This seems to be a Word XP problem I'm having, I don't know if there's something I can do to undo it, but I'm having trouble getting the smooth breathing mark and grave accent to show up in Word. For instance, if I set the font to BWGrkL and just start typing greek if I try to type the string "w'n" it will appear like this: w'n and not like the "w'n" it's supposed to.... anybody know what would cause that?? Otherwise the macro works very nicely.

Mike

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Hi Mike,

It looks like the problem is that you have Word set to convert quotes and apostrophes to smart quotes and apostrophes. To change it go to TOOLS | Auto Correct | AutoFormat as you type and uncheck the "Straight quotes with Smart quotes" box, do the same thing for the AutoFormat tab.

That should take care of it. This is why we want UNICODE!

And problem solved. Now if only I knew why they called them smart quotes :rolleyes:

Mike

Thanks Jim,

That was the root of my problem, and I should have figured it out.

Roy

I first ran into the smart quotes problem with Hebrew! Whenever I'd go to type a pathach, I'd get some form of gibberish that I didn't intend. You have to keep this in mind when you have "auto capitalization" on as well. For instance, a lowecase "a" is an aleph, but an uppercase "a" is a holem-vav.

One day, when Unicode is the completely accepted standard by everyone on all computers...as if it will ever happen...this won't be an issue...as much...

I'm sure that there will be some form of "auto-correct" that will stand in our way then as well!:rolleyes:

~Jim

Thanks for the great macros. I've been wanting to figure out a way to convert bwgrkl to unicode. The conversion from bwgrkl to unicode seems to work very well! Two things I've noticed with the conversion from unicode to bwgrkl: (1) A word with a smooth breathing mark and a grave on the same letter results in a smooth breathing mark (or an apostrophe [?]) with no accent after the letter. Has anyone else noticed this? (2) Spaces in between letters do not get converted to bwgrkl. This is not that big of a deal, but it's just something I noticed. Thanks again for the great macros!

Phil Gons