How to fix lowercase to small caps/conversion issues in Microsoft Word 2007 for certain unicode characters with diacritics?

December 27, 2012 9:02 AM

I have a text (MS Word 2007) that cites Vietnamese authors whose names are written in latin script with diacritics, stored in Zotero in lowercase (with the initial in uppercase). When using a citation style (for footnotes and bibliography) with small caps/uppercase for the names, Word keeps some characters in lowercase: "Dương Thiệu Tống" shows up as "DƯƠNG THIệU TốNG" instead of "DƯƠNG THIỆU TỐNG". How to fix this?

The Word lowercase to small caps/uppercase converter doesn't seem to work for Unicode characters higher than u0217, which explains why ư and ơ are properly converted, since they are not in the Vietnamese-specific range u1EA0-u1EF9. I could store the names in uppercase (but then I wouldn't be able to use a lowercase or small caps citation style), or I can write a macro that replaces the incorrect lowercase small caps with their uppercase equivalent but is there a better solution that does not involve post-processing (the text is huge)? Notably, is this fixed in later Word versions? Note that the Zotero test pane works correctly so that's a Word problem.

posted by elgilito to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I'm not exactly sure if I'm understanding, but in Word 2010 I entered "Dương Thiệu Tống and then made that small caps, and it works correctly. I thought I remembered that different fonts are handled differently, so I went ahead and tried it with Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, Palatino, and Palatino Linotype -- all correctly display as small caps.
posted by Houstonian at 9:18 AM on December 27, 2012

Thanks, if this works in Word 2010 it means that this was fixed. I'll just upgrade then.
posted by elgilito at 9:54 AM on December 27, 2012