Unicode Fonts

[wbryant]

I have a question about exporting (copying and pasting) Unicode fonts from Accordance. I can paste them into Word documents. I can even change it to SBL. But if I try to edit the text, I am unable to do that. The only thing Word allows me to do is try in Roman characters. Am I doing something wrong or does WORD not allow editing.

 

I have upgraded to 13.1 and still have these problems

 

 

P.S. I really prefer using Word Perfect, but for some rason it has trouble with all overstriked letters and a few more. I will say that 13.1 did improve my paste into WP in that all the fonts are the shape and size they are supposed to be. In 13.05 that was not the case.

[Silas Marrs]

I'd recommend pasting whatever you want into a paper or user tool or user note, then editing it there.  You can then copy it from there into word if you want.

[R. Mansfield]

P.S. I really prefer using Word Perfect, but for some rason it has trouble with all overstriked letters and a few more. I will say that 13.1 did improve my paste into WP in that all the fonts are the shape and size they are supposed to be. In 13.05 that was not the case.

 

Lack of unicode support in WordPerfect is a real issue. I'm surprised you're able to have any level of success pasting into WordPerfect at all. I was also surprised that the recently released WordPerfect 2020 did not remedy this.

[wbryant]

Silas,

Thanks. That was the solution I thought of and for now will use, but I am still curious why WORD does not allow such editing. 

[wbryant]

Richard, I was hoping the same. That is one of the reason I upgraded Word Perfect.  I will say that Hebrew with pointing and diacriticals does past into Word Perfect from 13.1  The only things is the words go from right to left rather than left to right. If I can figure out how to do get them reversed, I will be happy.  

[Joel Brown]

MS Word does allow such editing, but it doesn't know what language you wish to type. You'll need to switch to a unicode Greek or Hebrew keyboard if you wish to type those characters.  Accordance happily does conversions for you, but MS Word is too generic and wants a different keyboard set.

[wbryant]

Joel,

 

I am assuming that you mean I have to do more than just change the font name in the font menu. While I don't know that I want to actually change my "keyboard" is there a video somewhere which might show me how to do this?

[Joel Brown]

Here's a video I found that demonstrates the process:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rps_gmFXSms

 

Basically, it is important to clarify a "font" vs a "keyboard".  Back in the day, computers were limited, and could only handle english characters, so fonts were constructed that faked alternative languages.  For example, they may represent a greek alpha as an english 'a'.  This obviously can cause some confusion, causes dependency issues on the fonts, and isn't very future proof.

 

In the days of Unicode, this is no longer an issue.  A font is simply the particular visual display of a specific character, with no more 'faking'.  An english 'a' should always be an 'a', regardless of the font.  If you wish to type a greek alpha, you need to actually type an alpha.

 

If you change your keyboard to the Greek (or other) keyboard, now you are actually typing those characters.  Changing the font still lets you change the display of the characters, but they remain fundamentally the same - no matter the font, it is still an alpha.

 

In Accordance, since users switch between languages so often, we cheat a bit.  If we know for a fact you are typing Greek, even if you type an english 'a', we will convert it to an alpha for you. But, since MS Word doesn't know this, they need you to actually enter the alpha somehow, not just make a visual change to a different font.

 

I hope this helps clarify!

[wbryant]

Thank Joel I will have a look at that video