Convert Greek Unicode to Symbol Font in Microsoft Word on the Mac · 2010-05-01 14:57 by Andrew Fernandes
As many scientists know, many (most?) online manuscript submission systems are ancient and often require documents to be created with Microsoft Word. A lethal combination! Again, many (if not most) further require DOC formatted files, not DOCX format.
One interesting problem that we’ve recently had was that one journal kept messing up Greek characters in the manuscript. It would replace them with weird symbols. After much messing around, we finally determined that Word was (correctly) inserting Greek letters as Unicode. The online manuscript system simply could not handle the multibyte character encoding, and inserted garbage instead of Greek.
We determined, through a lot of trial and error, that inserting Greek characters as “Insert > Symbol” worked… until a collaborator edited the document on a different machine. Then the Greek characters would become a strange mix of Unicode and Symbol font.
So, playing around with AppleScript, I came up with the following utility. It installs into the “User Scripts” menu item of Word 2008 or later on the Mac. When run, it systematically searches for all Unicode Greek characters and replaces them with their Symbol Font alternatives. It works with both DOC and DOCX files. Windows users are on their own (sorry!).
I’ve included the source file if anyone wants to see how it works. Word 2008 has extensive AppleScript support, it turns out. Most people should probably just download the DMG and run the installer; it contains complete instructions on its use.
- Version 1.0 (10 November 2009)
- Installer: Greek Unicode to Symbol.dmg [48.50kB]
- Test Document: Test Word Document.docx [27.29kB]
- Source Code: Greek Unicode to Symbol.scpt [14.44kB]
- Initial release
