Holy Grail, part 2

It turns out that the holy grail is not so easily found.

The code which I posted here worked perfectly at work. So when I came home, I plugged it into a real program ... and of course, there was no bold text. Hmmm, I thought to myself, maybe I've written this code before and discarded it because it doesn't work on my computer. Maybe it will work on my client's computer, which is the main point.

Then I took the dog for a walk. Whilst on the walk, I thought about this 'bold' problem, and decided that I should attack it with a more scientific approach. First see whether the demo program does print bold text on my computer - after all, I'm using the same version of Word (2003), and the code which I saw on the internet was several years old, meaning that the functionality has existed from much earlier versions of Word.

So when I came home, I ran the original demo ... and got bold text. I then took the specific code for the bold text and plugged it into my program. Still bold text. I replaced the literal string being printed bold with what I actually want as bold - no bold. Aha! The moment of revelation! Could it be that this code prints English in bold text, but not Hebrew? This wouldn't be the first time that I've seen a gotcha with Hebrew text. As I say, maybe I have been here before and discarded the (almost) correct solution because it didn't print Hebrew text in bold. This time, I knew that the code was almost correct, and this gave me the impetus to carry on.

The next step was to see what Word does itself, by recording a macro and performing the required operation, then by looking at the resulting macro. I often do this, but sometimes there's a problem recognising the variable which Word uses for the operation. Anyway, this time I could see what was going on: first, there was the call to set the value of the 'bold' property, and then there was an extra call, setting the value of a property called boldbi (presumably a contraction of 'bold bidi', ie bidirectional, where 'bidi' is often used in Windows when printing right to left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic). Based on this knowledge, I then added a call in my program to set the value of this new property - and then my Hebrew text appeared in bold! So here is the complete 'bold' procedure:

Procedure Bold (const s: string);
begin
 wrdSel.Font.Bold:= 1;
 wrdSel.Font.BoldBi:= 1;
 wrdSel.TypeText (s);
 wrdSel.Font.Bold:= 0;
 wrdSel.Font.BoldBi:= 0;
end;

wrdSel is a variable global to this procedure, declared as per yesterday:

wrdSel:= wrdApp.selection.