5.0437 Diacritics in Word (2/81)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Sun, 10 Nov 1991 20:51:25 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0437. Sunday, 10 Nov 1991.
(1) Date: Wed, 6 Nov 91 12:33 GMT (42 lines)
From: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
BANKS@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Mac WORD diacriticals
(2) Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1991 11:28:19 -0600 (39 lines)
From: David Bantz <d-bantz@uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: 5.0430 Qs: Diacriticals; E-Texts; Keyboarding
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 91 12:33 GMT
From: Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology <BANKS@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Mac WORD diacriticals
Arno Bosse raises an issue I have been struggling with for a while and I
have to say at the start that I know no way of converting my `solutions'
into MS-DOS-speak.
I started by using Word's formula/glossary commands to overstrike sub-
and superscripted characters such as dash, full stop etc. My own need
is for diacriticals to transliterate North Indian languages. I set up a
new file, worked out the basic formula command to overstrike, say, a
superscripted dash (as a macron), then copied and pasted all the
relevant vowels into the formula. I did this for each kind of mark and
then saved all the entries as glossary entries. The whole thing was
then automated using a macro (QuicKeys or Apple's own Macro recorder).
After all this was done I could then drop the whole package onto
colleagues machines, together with a printed list of what keys to press
to get what results, which meant that non-technical users did not have
to worry about the processes involved. The drawbacks are that method
scews up line-spacing to an extent and that it is largely font-
dependent.
More recently, however, I have been using two Times-like fonts written by
K R Norman, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge. These
are PostScript (tm) fonts and look _very_ good. The corresponding
screen fonts are a bit murky, but could be cleaned up with Fontographer.
The advantage, theoretically, is that because Norman has based his fonts
on an ASCII set, although the diacritics will be lost in DOS
translation, their ASCII code should be retained (I don't know, having
never tried it and not really understanding either ACSII or Mac->DOS
translation). It should, therefore, be possible to use a line editor to
replace the translated ASCII codes wit diacritic characters created (by
what process, who knows?) for the relevant DOS word processor.
Norman is making his fonts freely available (they do diacritics for all N
Indian and Tibeto-Burman transliteration standards) and perhaps someone
who knew about fonts would know how to convert them into DOS readable
fonts.
Marcus Banks
ISCA, University of Oxford
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------48----
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1991 11:28:19 -0600
From: David Bantz <d-bantz@uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: 5.0430 Qs: Diacriticals; E-Texts; Keyboarding (3/53)
>Do anyone of you know of an EASY way to include diacritics in MS-Word
>files?
Type them in with the rest of the text. Or did you mean you want to
create special combinations like an umlaut on a g that aren't supported
directly by the Mac because they aren't used in current W. European
languages?
Use PopChar or KeyFinder to locate accented characters if you don't know
where they are on the keyboard (you can work it out with Keycaps, but you
have to remember to explore the dead keys). Use a laser font (Helvetica,
New Century Schoolbook,...) if you'd like the largest selection: capitals
with diacritics were not included in some of the oldest fonts (Geneva,
New York,...). The locations are standard across nearly all fonts - just
empty bitmaps in some locations of the older fonts.
You're going to have to work to transfer such information between Mac and
DOS; all the easy ways of trasferring files I've tried drop the
diacriticals or turn them to nonsense. Dumb but sure way is to find and
replace non-ASCII characters on the send side (-> &eaccute, etc) then
reverse the process on the transferred document in the new environment.
I know there must be a better way; I'll look forward to learning it from
a subsequent posting.
It's not hard, by the way, to remap the keyboard strokes to enter any
character, if, for example you'd like to replace a bracket with s-zet, or
have an azerty keyboard. You can do so without touching the font or the
encoding per se, so your rearrangement will have no effect on other users
of your files.
If you want characters not supported by the standard fonts (W. European
languages), first look for special fonts developed by others. There are
hundreds. Only then consider inventing your own.