Copying Greek into Microsoft Word

[pjpj911]

How can I copy my Greek text into word making it automatically Times New Roman size 12 font? Everytime I copy a sentence into Word it comes out in Geneva size 14.

[Rick Bennett]

How can I copy my Greek text into word making it automatically Times New Roman size 12 font? Everytime I copy a sentence into Word it comes out in Geneva size 14.

 

You may want to experiment with using a style just for Greek with your preferred font, size, etc.

 

Also, you can Paste Special

[Joe Weaks]

To add to what Rick said, Times New Roman can NOT be used for Unicode Greek, since it doesn't contain unicode glyphs for some polytonic Greek characters. So, you'll notice that some letters with accents look different, because Word is substituting probably Lucida Grande for that character missing in TNR.

Using styles to manage Greek text worked perfectly in my dissertation. You can create a "Character Style", one that can be applied to some text, irregardless of the "Paragraph Style", which must be applied to a whole paragraph.

I ended up preferring the font "Times" for my Greek text. It has the full unicode range I needed, and blends in well since my dissertation primary font was times. I think the SBL Greek unicode font looks absolutely horrible. And if you used Times, you don't have to mess with additional font installs or concerns about font standards across computers. I have my "Greek Text" style assigned to a keystroke, so all I do is type or paste Greek text, select, and hit the keystroke to standardize the font settings. The nice thing about using styles is that you can make changes to ALL the Greek text with one swoop.

 

As Rick mentioned, be sure you're familiar with the Paste Unformatted option under Paste Special, which matches the local style you're pasting into.

[Rod Decker]

If you use a font such as Gentium for your normal style in Word, there's an easier, quicker way. You can define an AppleScript to do the paste plain text trick and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. (I use Cmd-shift-v.) Word puts up a script menu that reads scripts located at

 

/Users/YourUserName/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items

 

You can find a number of places on the web that give info on variations of this. (Try a Google search for "mac word paste plain text script".) Here's one place to find it:

 

http://blog.mackerro...ffice-2008-mac/

 

And here's a major Mac site where you can download a "ready-to-use" script:

 

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9503

 

(There's a link there to an earlier article with instructions on how to install it.)

 

Joe's suggestion to use character styles for Greek can be very useful as well since if you use that for all Greek text, then Word will actually be able to spell-check long documents with large quantities of Greek text since the style can specify that it not be spell checked. Now if I could combine those two tricks into one keystroke, I'd be very happy. I suspect that someone with enough AppleScript savvy could, indeed, do that, but that's not my forte. (If it's yours, and you can make it happen, let us know!)

 

I'm working on two book manuscripts, one already at 400 pages (sg.-spaced) with tons of Greek text; the other will be over 500 pgs when finished (also sg sp.), but is only about half way there at the moment. The first has a long legacy of development and I did not use character styles (I've converting it now, but that's a very tedious, manual process.) Word gave up spell checking it a long time ago. (At least the newest version of Word doesn't crash when that happens as its predecessor did!). The second has used char styles from the beginning and is much easier to work with.

 

As to Times New Roman font, it depends on what version of that font you have. I think the most recent *is* usable for polytonic Greek--though I still prefer Gentium. (And I'm not so offended by the SBL Greek font as some are; it is a diff. style by far--an "older" looking design, a "Didot" style, I think--but very usable for some purposes, esp. when space is at a premium since it's more compact than Gentium.) You can check a morphology catalog that I posted this weekend to see it used in that context: http://ntresources.com/blog/?p=763

[Rod Decker]

The above is apparently a spam comment; should be deleted.

[Helen Brown]

Thanks, I wondered when I approved his registration. Constant vigilance is needed to keep oure Forums clear of spam.