[Biblical-languages] Text processing of Greek in a large batch of files

biblang at ntresources.com biblang at ntresources.com
Thu Sep 4 14:45:58 EDT 2003


This question is not a directly related to our usual concerns, but it is
directly related to handling Greek text in a series of files. Please excuse
the long explanation.

I teach several classes which are either resident classes supplemented with
web resources or totally Internet courses. To do so, we use the WebCT course
delivery software. We upgraded to a new version of WebCT this summer which
in many ways was a major improvement. But however WebCT processes and
displays text, it forces the browser to use a much smaller font than
normal--and the user (either teacher or student) cannot control this sizing.
The result is Greek text that is too small to be legible on screen. E.g.,
the difference between an omicron and a (medial) sigma is *one pixel*! That
is not good, especially for beginning students.

Where this causes me the biggest problem is the quiz system. It's not fair
to students to cause this level of frustration when taking quizzes. WebCT
stores each quiz question (and I have over a 1,000 of them total) in a
separate text file. (These are not html files, but they include html tags;
WebCT inserts the data from the text file into an html file as needed.) 

One possible solution is to specify the size using the <font size = "x"> tag
(or a <big> tag). But that means manually changing well over 1,000 text
files.

Can anyone point me to a Windows program/utility that would enable me to
automate this process? It would have to be able to automatically step
through each file in a given directory and do a search and replace of a
given text string. (And please remember that I'm not a programmer! I suspect
that a programmer or Unix guru could accomplish this without too much fuss,
but I don't have the knowledge to do so or the resources to draw on.)

It would need to do something like this:

Open the first file > find the string: <font face = "Galilee">
and then replace it with <font face = "Galilee" size = "3">
Save the file, close it, then open the next file and repeat.

I use Win XP and XP version of Office, and I wouldn't be surprised but that
the macro capabilities of Word/Office could so something like this, but I've
no idea how to go about it.

Any help would be appreciated.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 
Rodney J. Decker, Th.D., Assoc. Professor/NT
Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, PA, USA
URL: www.NTResources.com  
PURL: purl.oclc.org/NT_Resources/
Email: <rdecker> at <NTResources.com>
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 


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