[B-Greek] Greek font question

Ken Penner ken.penner at acadiau.ca
Thu Apr 10 12:52:54 EDT 2008


Hi Perry,

I don't think you have had your first two questions addressed yet. It is true that you can avoid these problems by using Unicode. It is also true that if you use legacy fonts (e.g., SPIonic), those fonts must be present on the destination computer (whether embedded or installed). But your question, if I read you correctly, is about something else, since you say you are using "the same fonts."

1. "What causes this?"
It sounds to me that you are experiencing the symbolization of the greek characters. They are coming across as Unicode characters with the first four bits set, i.e., the Unicode Fxxx range. To confirm this, move the insertion point after one of the boxes, and press Alt-X. The box should be converted to four hexadecimal characters (you may have to reset the font to see what these characters are). If the first of these hexadecimal characters is F, the Greek characters have been interpreted as symbols.

2. "Is there a remedy, or a way to recover the inflected Greek?"
To get the Greek back, you need to strip those four bits, and they will then be the right characters in the ASCII range for display using your legacy font. This is a chore to do manually, but I've written a Word macro to automate the procedure. Mind you, if you're running a macro to recover the Greek text, I really recommend going all the way: run a macro convert the legacy-encoded Greek to Unicode as well.

I hope this helps,

Ken M. Penner, Ph.D. (McMaster)

Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic vocabulary memorization software: 
http://purl.org/net/kmpenner/flash

> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org 
> [mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Perry Stepp
> Sent: April 9, 2008 4:55 PM
> To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: [B-Greek] Greek font question
> 
> A question for the more technically-minded list members:
> 
> Why do my Greek and Hebrew fonts keep falling out of my manuscripts?
> 
> I'm using a school computer and school software.  Word, MS 
> Office 2003; I'm using the Scholars Press fonts, SPIonic, etc.  
> 
> When I open a document that was written on another computer, 
> even though I'm using the same version of Word (not the same 
> version of Windoze, our new computers have XP Pro) and the 
> same fonts, all the Greek and Hebrew characters have been 
> replaced by these little empty boxes.  
> 
> I'm trying to work with old documents, editing them into a 
> new manuscript, and I need the Greek to work.  Very 
> frustrating.  And there doesn't seem to be a way to recover 
> the document with the Greek intact.
> 
> What causes this?  Is there a remedy, or a way to recover the 
> inflected Greek?  
> 
> Are there Greek fonts that are more stable than SPIonic, 
> which WON'T collapse and fall out of my documents?
> 
> PLS
> 
> Perry L. Stepp, Ph.D.



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