GreekTranscoder Version History

Version 1.0.9, 2016.09.29:

Minor UI changes to better work with recent versions of Word: in particular, the ‘Conversion Settings’ frame’s caption has been removed, since it wasn’t being displayed properly.
Updated the screen captures in the documentation.

Minor UI changes to better work with Word 2016 for Mac OS X.
There are now two versions of GreekTranscoder: one for Windows and one for macOS (a.k.a Mac OS X), in order to properly display French accented letters in the program’s UI when used in Word for Windows. The macOS version uses the old and obsolete Mac OS Roman encoding internally and won’t display accented letters correctly when used under Word for Windows: it’s a limitation of the VBA implementation in Word for macOS (all versions).
The French captions now properly use non-breaking spaces when needed.
The documentation has been completely revised.
Removed GreekTranscoderToolbar.dot: if you’re using an older version of Word that still supports it, you can download it separately.

This version has been tested with Word 2011 & 2016 for Mac OS X and with Word 2016 for Windows and is compatible with all three.
Times New Roman (Unicode) is now a valid source and target font.
Removed the warnings about using non-Unicode versions of Times and Helvetica as target fonts.
The background color now used in the GreekTranscoder’s user form is a bit lighter and better matches the most recent Mac OS X UI.
GreekTranscoder is released as uncompiled VBA code to avoid compatibility issues between different versions of Office and is compiled by Word at runtime.

Confirmed that Microsoft Word 2016’s VBA implementation has the same bugs as the version that shipped with Microsoft Word 2011 and requires the same workaround.
People willing to make a donation to support GreekTranscoder are now sent to the program’s web site.

Modified the code to work around some of the bugs in Microsoft Word 2011’s VBA implementation; however some limitations remain.

In the Unicode transcoder, the ‘MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL M’ and ‘MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL P’ characters were transposed: the error has been corrected.
In message boxes, the program now displays icons appropriate to the context if available on the current platform.
Better interrupt handling.
Minor code optimzations.

The program now always reports the conversion progress accurately.
When verifying and sorting composing characters’ sequences, the program now properly switches fonts if needed.
When switching fonts, the ‘Convert Selection Only’ setting is now correctly taken into account.
When replacing Greek characters, the program now makes sure that all the ‘AutoFormat’ options are turned off, not just those affecting quotes.
The program requires Word 2000 or later, not Word XP or later, as the included warning message’s title mistakenly put it.
The font previously identified as ‘ALPHABETUM’ in the default font list is now properly called ‘ALPHABETUM Unicode’.
The font ‘Code2001’ shouldn’t have been included in the font list: the font ‘Code2000’ now replaces it.

General code clean-up and optimization: the program is much smaller as a result, and should be faster as well.
The program now systematically verifies and sorts composing characters’ sequences for encodings that use them.
Providing an encoding is susceptible of such composing characters’ verifications, choosing both a source and a target font belonging to that encoding will run those checks.
The program now produces pairs of surrogate UTF-16 codepoints to represent UTF-32 codepoints Word can’t insert directly rather than use other characters as substitute.
Worked around a problem with Word sometimes losing track of the current selection and transcoding all the document instead.
Sometimes the program would fail to color in red the characters it couldn’t transcode: it’s now fixed.
When converting Beta Code texts which only use regular sigma letters, the program will now produce final sigma letters as needed.
Increased the font box size in the GreekTranscoderToolbar.

The Vilnius University encoding is now supported.
The routine which verifies the Unicode composing characters’ sequences is now much more efficient.
The default font list now includes ‘Code2001’, ‘Gentium’ and ‘GentiumAlt’, and ‘ALPHABETUM’, plus all the Vilnius-University-encoding fonts listed in the Antioch documentation.
The default font list no longer includes the so-called ‘Semata’ fonts.
The replacement order has been modified so that capital vowels with prosgegrammeni are now treated after the small letter iota with diacritics, but before the plain small letter iota.
The transcoders have been updated and a few mistakes corrected.
Improved the treatment of WinGreek quotation marks.
Corrected an issue on Windows where, even if the minimal configuration was not met, the program would still load.
On Windows, the program displays a smaller window and uses Arial 10pt instead of 12pt.