UNICODE SORTING

[Rebecca]

Greetings again. Sorry to post this question again, but I'm afraid my first
posting was ambiguous or confusing, so I'll try to express the question
differently. I have a huge list of Greek words in UNICODE font (Gentium,
similar to Palatino Linotype). When I try to sort these words in MS WORD
2003, I don't get an alphabetized sort (for example, accented alphas come
after accented epsilons!). I did a search on the Internet and found the
problem mentioned (that is, the difficulty of sorting with UNICODE fonts),
and someone mentioned that you need to install special software to get around
this problem. I am at a loss as to how to solve this problem, and regret
converting all these words to UNICODE fonts. Could anyone give me some help
or suggestions regarding this matter?

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Rebecca,

You seem to be using polytonic Greek, and Word hasn't the capability to sort
that properly.

You could write two macros, one to replace characters from the "Greek extended"
block (U+1F00-U+1FFF) with the Greek characters plus accent marks, and one to
replace them back.
With accent marks (combining diacritical marks), sorting should work fine.

You'd replace U+1F00 (greek letter alpha with psili) with U+03B1 (alpha) plus
U+0313 (combining comma above = greek psili), and so on.
And after you've sorted, you could replace U+03B1 + U+0313 back in U+1F00.

Sorry, can't think of a simpler solution. You might ask MS to fix sorting for
polytonic Greek:
http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

Regards,
Klaus