View Full Version : Division of Greek words gives problems

08-19-2004, 06:10 AM

When paste Greek sentences into my Danish Word xp I get in trouble with the division of words.

Instead of using the regurlar "-", the bw-font makes a circumflex or something like that.

In each case I have to highlight the Greek text and tell Word not to divide it.

Now, there must be a better way! Does anybody else have the same problem?

Any suggestions to solve it?



08-19-2004, 08:43 AM
Perhaps it would be best to turn off auto hyphenation in WordXp.

If you really want to use hyphens you may just want to do a search using the "find" dialog in word (ctrl-f). You can then search for all hyphens that are in the bwgrkl font.

I would tell you how to do an auto replace for the correct character to show up within the bwgrkl font, but there would still be a problem, as when you hyphenate a word so that part of it can move to the next line, you are not supposed to "break up syllables". Word automatically recognizes syllables for modern languages, but not for Koine Greek written in bwgrkl (the BibleWorks font), so you would have to "break" the word yourself.

The other option would be to do a find and replace to simply remove any hyphens followed by a space in bwgrkl. The hyphen in a regular English font would turn into a rough breathing mark under a circumflex in bwgrkl. You could remove this by putting in the find line (in Word) the following: -^w (making sure that the font is set to bwgrkl in the find dialog's formatting options). In the replace line you could simply put nothing and it would remove the - and the space following it. It should work, because I know of no Greek words that end with this accent except for "h-|" but this word actually ends with an iota subscript, so the above find dialog will not "find" this word.

If you want to hyphenate a Greek word in bwgrkl, the proper character in the BibleWorks Greek font for a hyphen is the ampersand (&).

I hope this is not too confusing...

08-20-2004, 10:17 AM
Thanks for your detailed reply. Unfortunately it doesn't work in my Danish word. It turns out that the character behind the bwgrkl in Times new roman is "v" - when I do a searh on that it finds it alright - but also a lot of other places.

It wouldn't be nice to turn of the hyphenation since I am writing a disstertation and really need it. It would also be a problem to format the Greek passages manually since they are manifold.

If you have another idea, please let me know.

Would it be possible to do a macro that turns of the hyphenation whenever there is a bwgkl font??? That would surely do the thing!


08-20-2004, 10:39 AM
I don't know how to make a macro that would do that. Perhaps someone on the forum would know how.

You should still be able to do a search for all hyphens (by this I mean the hyphen that WORD inserts in the auto hyphenation process) that are in the Bwgrkl font and followed by a space. See the picture below for what the find and replace dialog would look like in English.
At the very least you would be able to click "find" again and again to look for possible instances of a split bwgrkl word.

Does anyone out there know of a macro that could help Morten?


08-23-2004, 09:13 AM
Hi again

For some reason nothing is found when searching for -^w (with the font set to bwgrkl). I don't know why. It must have something to do with me using a Danish Word xp.

But: someone else must experince this problem!

Would I not be right in saying that it is a bug in the Bibleworks font? Shouldn't it have been made so the hyphen character coresponds with Word's?

Any suggestions?


08-23-2004, 12:45 PM
Perhaps it could be considered a "bug" but I know that BibleWorks has had their font "mapped" this way for quite some time!

I am not familiar with the Danish version of Word. Have you looked in Word's "help files" for the various ways you can "find" certain types of text in the find & replace dialog? The "-" should be the same in either language, but my suspicion is that "^w", which is the code for a "white space" in the English version of Word, may be different in Danish. Look in Word's "find & replace" dialog for a drop down menu that is called "more options" or "special options." This drop down menu has a list of options for "special characters" like a "white space" that you can insert in the find dialog. Look for the appropriate code and then click it after you have typed the hyphen.

The other option would be to write a macro that converts BWGRKL into Unicode. Until BibleWorks begins supporting Unicode itself, I don't think there is much else you could do.

Another option would be to perform a font conversion using the BibleWorks font mapping tool/font conversion tool. I don't have much experience with this, so the best I could tell you would be to look at the manual/help files for this. Perhaps another Greek font will serve you better, like SBL's font (http://www.sbl-site.org/Resources/Resources_BiblicalFonts.aspx)or one of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=Home)non-unicode fonts.