Change color of Hebrew cantillation characters

Thanks very much for a detailed example of VBA. Just following the VBA is a lesson for me!

However, I tried running it on some text and the diacritic color didn't change, perhaps because I had Options|Advanced|Diacritics set to green, which perhaps overrides any VBA adjustments.

I then tried Alt-O,f to change the font color of one word: the consonants changed but not the vowels or the cantillation mark. This word has three consonants, two vowels below the consonants and one cantillation mark above the consonants: אֶחָד֩

Here's another word, יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל with one cantillation mark and one vowel beneath the second letter from left (working left-to-right). The cantillation mark is etnachta, 1425.

Is there some special way to tell VBA to select a diacritic character?

Thanks for any further help.

Hi @joe lewis ,

Thanks for the update.

There should not be a separate VBA method needed to select a Hebrew diacritic. Since the vowels and cantillation marks are combining characters, Word may not treat them the same way as normal letters when you try to format them manually, but VBA should still be able to detect them by character code.

Since the consonants changed color but the vowels and cantillation marks did not, I would suggest a small test on a selected word that contains etnachta. Please select the word first, then run this macro:

Sub TestSelectedEtnachta()
    Dim mark As Range
    Dim codeValue As Long
    Dim foundCount As Long

    For Each mark In Selection.Range.Characters
        If Len(mark.Text) > 0 Then
            codeValue = AscW(mark.Text)

            If codeValue = &H591 Then
                mark.Font.Color = wdColorRed
                foundCount = foundCount + 1
            End If
        End If
    Next mark

    MsgBox foundCount & " etnachta mark(s) found."
End Sub

If the message shows 1 or more, that means VBA is finding the cantillation mark as a separate character. In that case, the same method can be expanded to the full cantillation range.

If the message shows 0, then Word is likely not exposing the selected text in a way that this character loop can use directly, which would explain why the color change is not reaching the mark.

If your Word installation has a separate diacritics display-color setting and it is currently set to green, it may also be worth changing that temporarily as a test, since it could affect what you see on screen.

If the test does find the mark, you can then expand the same idea to the full cantillation range:

Sub ColorSelectedCantillationRed()
    Dim mark As Range
    Dim codeValue As Long

    For Each mark In Selection.Range.Characters
        codeValue = AscW(mark.Text)

        If codeValue >= &H591 And codeValue <= &H5AE Then
            mark.Font.Color = wdColorRed
        End If
    Next mark
End Sub

The code snippets are only for reference, so please adjust them as needed for the actual document, selected range, and colors you want to use.

Hi @joe lewis ,

I wonder if there is any update on this post. If you have any question, feel free to reach out. I'm happy to support you. 

Thanks for all your help. Selecting an etnachta and changing its color gave me surprising different results, depending on the font.

In Narkisim, the etnachta doesn't change color, but in Ezra SIL SR the etnachta does change color.

I guess some fonts treat the diacritic+consonant as a single character.

This isn't only with Hebrew, as this post explains: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47956716/colored-diacritics-and-unicode-behaviour

This is a mystery to me, but I'm happy to have all the diacritics the same color at present. I'll have to put in more time to figure out which combination of font and Options.UseDiffDiacColor will get me closer to my ultimate goal. Meanwhile, I've a lot to ponder with thanks for all your help!