i'm trying to find and replace SMAA to alphaSMA in Word 2010, and looking for the osx ascii code for the Greek lowercase alpha.
^945 doesn't work
this website is nice: http://www.idautomation.com/kb/mac_ascii.html
but it doesn't contain the code for the lowercase alpha and i was hoping to avoid going through the 700+ other codes looking for lowercase alpha
if anyone knows you've got my appreciation for a long time to come, Thank you!
Mac OS X (10.6)
You can't type α from the normal US keyboard on a Mac. You can copy/paste it from right here, switch to the Greek keyboard and type a, or switch to the Unicode Hex keyboard and type option/alt (hold) + 03B1.
PS Word 2010 is for Windows. Do you mean Word 2011?
Another way to get greek letters is to open Character Viewer (Edit > Special Characters).
Thank you Tom!
i'm sorry to have lowercased ASCII, didn't mean any disrespect just in case anything, just wanted to make that clear.
Your advice is great, i could just add that you can also use symbol font, and indeed it is 2011, darn things mix me up, it's like they come out every other day.
the thing is that i've got a document with about 500 instances of SMAA that are sprinkled over 100 pages, and i'd like to use the find and replace function.
thankfully, there is a way to find and replace mixed special and Latin characters, it is to use ^nnn, where n represents the decimal code of the character
therefore for my change it would be find SMAA and replace ^nnnSMA, where nnn = decimal for lowercase Greek alpha
problem is finding a complete chart for OS X, may not exist like it does for windows
edit: i'd like to add this is not my choice or decision! i would just keep it SMAA, my boss is asking and this would be a great immediate help to me and most certainly to him in the future.
Is it really not possible for you to just type SMAA in the "find" box and then αSMAA (copy/pasted right from this posting) into the "replace by" box and do it that way?
The decimal code for α is indeed 945 if you need that.
I would recommend you not use the Symbol font, because MS stuff often has an old non-Unicode version of that which may look like an α to you but the data actually created is for a lower case latin a or some other bogus character.
unfortunately, even though i can cut/paste the alpha character into find and replace field, the output is 'A' and not lowercase alpha,
945 is for windows, and i'll be using that for the operation on a windows machine as a last resort. surely, this character must exist in OS X's ASCII chart.
edit: Thanks for the advice about symbol font! indeed that is a case i experienced! oops! i just realized i haven't tried this operation on mountain lion, been using 10.6 but will try that too on a different lab computer. mine's an older model and i haven't tried to do this operation in my openoffice word processor on my 10.7 laptop either, i'll be looking into these
rfatahi123 wrote:
unfortunately, even though i can cut/paste the alpha character into find and replace field, the output is 'A' and not lowercase alpha,
Did you copy/paste the alpha character from your web browser like l suggested? I don't see how that could be transformed into latin.
945 is the decimal of hex 03B1, the Unicode value for α
OS X uses Unicode and Word does as well starting with Word 2004. I think only Windows has the "ascii chart" stuff you mention, which is 1990's encoding technology. One source tells me the old Windows ascii code for alpha is 224.
Have you tried either the Greek keyboard or the Unicode Hex keyboard? You activate them in system prefs/language & text/input sources.
PS I don't have Office, but with OpenOffice this kind of search/replace action worked just as expected on a long string of A's:
Amazing! Thank you Tom!! You saved me hours upon hours!! may Santa decorate you for the help soon!! Best Regards!! rf
ascii code for lowercase alpha?
