Forum Discussion
Requesting Assistance with Diacritic Search Functionality
I use diacritics in Word and PowerPoint to accurately transliterate Arabic words. For instance, 'hadith' is written as 'ḥadīth', and 'kitab' as 'kitāb', using diacritical marks such as ā, ī, ū, ṣ, ḍ, ḥ, ṭ, ẓ, and ʿ.
To facilitate quick access, I've added a .dot document to the Microsoft startup folder on Local Disk (C:), allowing me to insert these letters easily using 'ALT' and the corresponding key. This method works seamlessly in Word but unfortunately not in PowerPoint.
However, I'm encountering an issue when searching within my documents. Typing with diacritics is cumbersome, so I prefer to search without them and still find matching results. I've attempted to enable the wildcard option in Advanced Find but haven't achieved the desired results.
Is there a method to accomplish this?
(I contacted Support regarding this matter and was advised to seek help here.)
You've mentioned attempting to use wildcards in the advanced find option in Word. This method can be enhanced to work more effectively with diacritics by using specific wildcard characters to substitute for any letter:
Use the ? wildcard to represent any single character.
Use the * wildcard to represent any string of characters.
For example, to search for "ḥadīth" without typing diacritics, you might input h?d*th. This will match any single character in place of "ḥ" and any string of characters in place of "ī".
