GraecaII and SymbolGreekII to SBLGreek Conversion Macro
Posted by Matt Postiff March 1, 2018 on Matt Postiff's Blog under Greek General
If you have older documents that use the GraecaII non-unicode Greek font, you may be interested in a macro that I wrote. It runs in Word 2010 and newer. It takes all GraecaII characters, including accent marks, and converts them to SBLGreek font. SBLGreek is a free Unicode font. The advantage of this is that the old encoding goes away. Another advantage is that multi-character codes, e.g. letters that have a couple of diacritics on them, are transformed into a single unicode character. This will "future proof" your document so that it will not become unusable in the future due to older fonts becoming unavailable. Any Unicode font with Greek support will be able to show the document properly.
Update 5/10/2018: More labor resulted in a second macro that does the same for the SymbolGreekII ASCII (1-byte) font. It converts to SBLGreek as well. This was tested on the entire book of 1 Timothy and works. There are probably some combinations of letters and accents that don't work, so buyer beware! Let me know if you have any troubles with it and I can give an assist.
The macros are available here: GraecaAndSymbolGreekConversionMacro.txt
Download the macro text file first. You may have to right click the link above and instruct your browser to "Save link as..." Go into your Word document, navigate the menu to Developer | Macros, and create a new macro. You will be in the Visual Basic program at this point. Copy the contents of the macro file in the space where you can type code. Make sure you overwrite any code that is already in place. Save the file. Now you can go back to Developer | Macros, select that macro, and run it. Hopefully it will work. On large documents, it may take a few of minutes.
Before running the macro, be aware of where your cursor is, and what text is selected. If some text is selected, the macro will run only on that text. If the cursor is halfway through the document, it will only convert the text after the cursor. You usually will want to de-select all text, and put the cursor at the beginning (Ctrl-Home).
Macros last revised 9/4/2018.
