by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/02/12 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/02/12/7633526.aspx
Over in the Suggestion Box, Andy asks:
Hi,
I am working with Word 2003, and I have a question about language keyboards and fonts. I work with Hebrew in a lot of the papers I have to write for school, and I have found Unicode support very helpful in to that end. Switching between English and Hebrew keyboards is very smooth and easy, but I get frustrated because Times New Roman just doesn't cut it for a Hebrew font.
Is there any way that Word can automatically switch to another font when I change to Hebrew Keyboards? What I mean is this: Is there some setting in Word to make it so that when I switch from English to Hebrew keyboards, that the font will automatically switch from Times New Roman to Ezra SIL SR (the Hebrew font I use)? Right now, I have to manually switch between the two, and it sometimes is frustrating.
Thanks for your help!
~Andy
This is actually not too hard to do, as long as you define a keyboard under a language that word thinks of as a complex script one (such as Hebrew).
All you have to do is launch the Font... dialog, which looks like this in Word 2003:
and like this in Word 2007:
Just change the value in that Complex Scripts section, and then when you change the keyboard to a complex script language, word will usually set to that font....
Now I say usually since here are times that Word will believe it knows better and will override the choice given here, mainly when it believes that the font you selected cannot handle the input language or cannot handle what the characters in question require.
But in Andy's case it should do well....
This post brought to you by ﭏ (U+fb4f, aka HEBREW LIGATURE ALEF LAMED)
# Shoshannah Forbes on 17 Feb 2008 7:27 AM:
What about when both languages belong to the same group, say like Hebrew and Arabic or English and French?
Is there an easy way to automatically switch the font based on the language?
# Michael S. Kaplan on 17 Feb 2008 8:12 AM:
There is no easy way to CHOOSE the font in those cases when word has its own ideas for font fallback, no. But if you use the fonts that it would have fallen back to anyway then it will not switch them.
This primarily applies to the Arabic/Hebrew case. It will use the combination of the keyboard language and the Unicode subrange to make its decision....
# Christian Somody on 19 Feb 2008 5:16 PM:
I'm sure you could easily assign a macro key for changing the font. Much simpler (if both languages are in the same "group").