Converting Greek fonts within a word document

[Philip Richardson]

I have a 300 page document (my PhD dissertation to be precise!). I am using MS Word for Mac and have written the English text using Times New Roman (and it needs to stay that way). It is going to be published, but the publisher requires all citations in Greek (of which there are many, interspersed throughout the document) to be in SBL Greek font. Currently all Greek text is in the Gentium font.

 

Does anyone know a program/macro etc., that could convert JUST the Greek in Gentium (not the English in Times New Roman) to SBL Greek. Of course, I could do it by hand but I'm trying to see if there would be a quicker way. I know that BibleWorks (Boo! Hiss!) has produced a Macro which converts their BibleWorks Greek and Hebrew fonts into SBL Greek and Hebrew fonts, and wondered if anyone knows of anything similar that I can use? Thanks a lot.

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi Philip,

This is simple if Gentium is a Unicode Font:

Edit > Find > Advanced Find and Replace

At the bottom, Format > Font

- find Gentium

- replace it with SBL Greek

Regards,

Michel

[Michel Gilbert]

Edit: The Find and Replace box opens up when you click the arrow at the bottom left. Then you will see the Format > Font option at the bottom

[Philip Richardson]

Thank you, Michel! I didn't imagine it could be that simple . . .

 

I have tried this and got as far as "Replace with". However, unlike when I was able to select the font to find (in this case Gentium from a list of all the fonts), the command "Replace with" brings up an arrow which you would expect to produce a drop down menu. When I click on it, nothing appears, so I am unable to select the font to replace it with. I tried just typing in the words "SBL Greek" but when I applied it to the document, it just replaced instances of Gentium with the WORDS "SBL Greek" – not what I was looking for!

 

Do you have any ideas? Where am I going wrong? Thanks so much for your help . . .

Edited November 10, 2017 by Philip Richardson

[Michel Gilbert]

I'm not sure what you mean. Do these screenshots help?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 10, 2017 by Michel Gilbert

[Philip Richardson]

I have found a little more information in Word help which completes the next step for me:

 

Click in the box next to Replace with.

 

On the Format menu, select the replacement formatting. If a second dialog box appears, select the formats that you want, and then click OK.

 

Click Replace, Replace All, or Find Next.

 

When I tried to "Replace All" it replaced at least one word. Depending on which criteria I select, in my case it replaced 66 words, but I know from my first (mistaken) attempt that there are at least 200 words in the document and I could only find one that had correctly changed.

 

Does anyone know if I need to select any of the following criteria that are given as options?: Match case, Find whole words only, Use wildcards, Sounds like, Find all word forms, Match diacritics, Match control characters (these options appear for both "find" and "replace", so you can potentially make selections in 2 places.

 

Just tried again with no criteria as "Replace all". It claims that 221 replacements have been made. I can now see that some have been made and some haven't. Any solutions to this?

 

Also tried doing and applying to footnotes, but didn't work at all there.

[Michel Gilbert]

Are you sure all your Greek is typed with a Unicode font? Are you sure you didn't mix other fonts at the beginning of your research? Select some of the Greek that didn't replace, and change it to SBL Greek. Does it work?

 

I have to go now, but I'll check back later tonight if I can, to see if you figured it out.

[Timothy Jenney]

Here's hoping you are working on a copy of the document, not the original.

[Philip Richardson]

Hello, Timothy/Dr. J! Can you explain your comment? Was that a hint of some kind . . .?! I have my document saved to dropbox, to an external hard drive etc etc. 

[Philip Richardson]

Michel:

 

Thank you, once again for taking the time to help me – I really appreciate it. I had already followed the steps displayed in your screenshots before I saw them. As I mentioned in my last post, I had to go back up to the main screen and select "Format" to get the fonts drop down box to appear.

 

The curious thing is that, when I follow those instructions and select "Replace all" it tells me that it has replaced something like 220 words (which didn't seem enough to me). Out of my five main chapters (the first chapter has hardly any Greek), it has changed all the words to SBL Greek in the fifth chapter, but not in any of the preceding ones! To answer your other insightful question, all my Greek words are in Gentium, which is a Unicode font. I have tried manually replacing the Gentium words with SBL Greek in various parts of the document, with no difficulty.

 

I originally wrote the various chapters in Apple "Pages" as separate documents, then exported them to Word documents. Subsequently, I have copied and pasted these Word documents to make one new Word document (which I need to do for the publisher). Could my difficulties have anything to do with this, do you think? 

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi again,

Ah, so the truth comes out. Yes, it could have something to do with that. When you import from other word processors, sometimes you import invisible and/or incompatible formatting. The safest way to import or export is with plain Unicode text, and reformat it in your new document. Did you write your 5th chapter in Word? It could also be the font. Do an experiment and see if you can replace all Gentium with another Greek Unicode font, like Galatia SIL.

It also occurred to me, you're not using Word for Mac 2011 are you? I wouldn't expect it to work like the 2016 version. If you mixed versions of Pages with Word for Mac 2011 and 2016, that might especially cause problems.

There is one more thing you could try. Try to find every letter of the Greek alphabet without any formatting, one at a time, and replace it the same SBL Greek letter - just type α in the Find box, and replace with Format > Font > SBL Greek, and type α in the Replace box. See if they all change. If they do, do the rest of the alphabet and any other characters.

Otherwise, you might have to do it manually.

Regards,

Michel

[Philip Richardson]

Michel

 

I fear that you are right!

 

I wrote my dissertation over a period of 2 years and I certainly did not have Word for Mac 2016 at that point (it was before 2016!). I think I started with no earlier than Word for Mac 2011; probably an earlier version still. By the end of the process I certainly didn't have the latest version (although I do now). It's possible that I wrote the last chapter in Word, although I don't think I did. I must have done something different with it though. 

 

You say "If you mixed versions of Pages with Word for Mac 2011 and 2016, that might especially cause problems." I almost certainly worked with different versions of Pages (Pages had a radical relaunch and new numbering system of versions midway through the process).

 

I tried your experiment with switching one font to another. Interestingly, when I asked it to replace all instances of Gentium with Galatia SIL, it says there are no instances of Gentium (precisely "0") to replace! It's almost as if it is counting what is now my fifth chapter as a separate document – there are indeed no instances of Gentium in that chapter (it obviously used to be a separate document, and it's the one written last) since they also have been successfully altered to SBL Greek. It seems not to be counting the rest of the document as a document! 

 

I'm not sure how helpful it would be to go through each letter of the alphabet at a time – what about all the various accents?

 

I'm afraid it looks like I'll just have to do it manually.

 

I really appreciate your insights and desire to help. At least I'm closer to knowing what the problem is!

[Douglas Fyfe]

In word for Windows you can right click on a word and there is an option to select all text with same formatting; thereafter you can simply change the font.
It’s not perfect (I’ve just had to do it with a document half your size) but it just took scrolling through and repeating the exercise several times.

 

To be precise, on PC it's: right click > styles > select text with a similar formatting.

I would hope there's something similar. 

Edited November 10, 2017 by Douglas Fyfe

[Philip Richardson]

Thank you, Douglas, for getting in touch.

 

I'm using Word for Mac. I don't see the option you're describing (could you give me the steps to follow?) in this version and I'm not sure I fully understand you. I know how to change each word/sentence manually, but I don't see a way of solving my problem right now with the slightly complicated process that led to this current document (see the various posts above, interacting with Michel), unless I'm missing what you're saying (which I well might be!). 

[Douglas Fyfe]

 right click > styles > select text with a similar formatting.

 

 

Once you've done that all the text in (in your case) Gentium will be selected and you can edit it.

 

If it's not there on Mac I can't help.

I assume it's essentially the same as what Michel is suggesting but with a lot fewer steps.

 

I tried taking a screen shot but it disappears when I click to the snipping tool. Then I tried taking a mobile phone photo but the file size is too big to upload. Sorry! I tried!

 

 

Command-Y might be your friend for the next few hours.

Edited November 10, 2017 by Douglas Fyfe

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi Douglas,

It's a great idea. But since I moved to Mac, and Word for Mac, I've noticed there is a lot missing in it compared to the Windows version. I tried what you suggested, looked up select and styles in Help, format font, and a few other things, and I can't find a way to do it on the Mac. I don't presume to know everything about the Mac version yet, so I hope someone will chime in and show Philip how to do this.

Regards,

Michel

[Philip Richardson]

Douglas and Michel:

 

Thank you both for your most recent contributions. Michel just beat me to it: when you right click on a word you don't get the option "styles" in Word for Mac. As Michel says, Word for Mac seems to be a slimmed down version compared to the original for Windows. So, I can't see an obvious way to do it, as Michel says – especially because of the complicated process that led to me creating this document! Thanks for trying anyway . . .

[Douglas Fyfe]

My last thought is to find someone with a pc and fix it there? We have one of each (see my footer) so I am able to try things with my wife’s Mac if I need to.

[Philip Richardson]

Douglas: Thank you so much for those last two suggestions. I had not thought of using a PC to open up the document (my wife has one) and in my ignorance, I did not know Command-Y! It certainly made the job a little easy and the process didn't take as long as I'd feared.