How to convert Microsoft Word document with footnotes to USFM

Question

We have a historical NT (from 1542) with extensive comments in footnotes to help modern readres to handle it. Is there a handy way to convert this into USFM so that the footnotes would become footnotes in USFM files, too?

Any help would be appreciated,

anon982572

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Answer 1

anon982572,

There is a utility for converting RTF documents with styles to USFM. It is called RTF2SFM and you can find it at the link below
http://www-01.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=103
I have used it in the past to import MS Word documents, but I don’t remember if it handles footnotes well or not. If MS Word uses a style for footnotes then it should work. Otherwise you might need to use RTF2SFM for the text and one of the other suggested methods to fix the footnotes.

anon044949

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Comments

Updated link for RTF2SFM is https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=RTF2SFM.

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There is another, GUI based, tool to convert Word files into USFM: SILAS is a Word template containing macros to convert both directions (designed in pre-Pathway times to offer tweakable print export from Paratext. I see that its last update is in 2013, designed for Word 2010, so I’m not sure what it does with more recent Word versions of footnotes… but I see that RTF2SFM’s latest version is 2009 so it’s probably not any better. SILAS is fairly easy to use, with its macros available via Menu items.

You might have to poke around a bit to find the Word-to-USFM macros but they are there. The macros change specific style names into USFM-marked text, so if your Word doc is not marked up with standard Scripture-based stylenames you will have to add these, or possibly modify existing stylenames in your Word document. But SILAS can handle a good range of stylename sets that have been hanging around since 2000 or before. If you need help tagging elements of a Word document with stylenames, write back to this group. Some of us group members can probably dig up instructions for getting about 90% of the styles attached semi-automatically.

SILAS is listed in the “Unsupported” section of software.sil.org/products, which links to

Admin edit: Fixed formatting from e-mail.

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Answer 2

Hi anon982572,

I’m not sure if this answers your question, but I’ve been involved with
USFM-izing a couple of study Bibles which had extensive footnotes and cross
references. We used the \ef marker for extended footnotes and it works
well. It even carries over into the Android apps generated by scripture app
builder.

If you want to see the project in question and how things were handed, then
look at the Paratext resource project “English: Grace Ministries study
Bible”

Blessings,
Mark

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Answer 3

If you’re asking about a way to transfer text from a Word footnote into text in the body of the document where the reference was, I believe this code will do that. It also adds "\f + \ft " at the beginning of the footnote text and “\f*” at the end of the footnote text. It also deletes the word footnotes.

In Word 2013, you can put this code in a macro by going to View > Macros, then click VIew Macros, type a name for your macro, click Create, then click Edit. Paste the text below in the macro box between the first line and the “End sub” at the bottom.

Since there wouldn’t be an easy way to undo, make sure you keep an unchanged copy of your document before running this so you can always go back to that copy if this fails.

For Each fnote In ActiveDocument.Footnotes
   fnote.Reference.Select
   Selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
   Selection.TypeText Text:="\f + \ft "
   Selection.TypeText Text:=fnote.Range.Text
   Selection.TypeText Text:="\f*"
   fnote.Reference.Select
   Selection.Delete

Next fnote

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Answer 4

I found this Macro code useful, as I often import translations from Word to Paratext, but had not found a way to handle footnotes.
I noticed that this properly places the footnotes where they belong, but the marker checks on Paratext complain about the missing footnote reference.
I went ahead and experimented with some regular expressions, and found that I can use RegEx Pal, (or the Regex function of Edit Pad lite) to insert the correct Footnote references in. In case anyone would find this useful, here are the search and replacement strings I used. For Edit Pad lite, the Dot function needs to be turned on.

Search String Edit Pad lite
(?<=\c (\d+).?\v (\d+(-\d+)?).?)\f + (?!\fr)

Search String RegExPal
(?s)(?<=\c (\d+).?\v (\d+(-\d+)?).?)\f + (?!\fr)

Replacement string
\f + \fr \1:\2 (there is a blank space at the end of the replacement string)
BEH

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