# Converting a mixed encoding Word doc to a single encoding (Unicode)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/converting-a-mixed-encoding-word-doc-to-a-single-encoding-unicode/419118>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 13, 2007, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/converting-a-mixed-encoding-word-doc-to-a-single-encoding-unicode/419118 "2007-09-13T21:07:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tiltypig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dbc845/32.png) [@tiltypig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tiltypig)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2007, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/converting-a-mixed-encoding-word-doc-to-a-single-encoding-unicode/419118/1 "2007-09-13T21:07:49Z")

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I have a Microsoft Word document in Czech that is partly encoded in Unicode and partly using code page Windows 1250. I am trying to get the entire thing into Unicode. Can you help me figure out how to do this?

I have the following utility installed:  
[http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site\_id=nrsi&cat\_id=TECkit](http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&cat_id=TECkit)

Which is all well and good, but for this to work, I have to run it on the file one sentence at a time, because it happily converts text that’s already in Unicode to… well… more Unicode. Incorrectly. Like c with a hachek (010D) gets converted to regular c (0063).

This is driving me crazy–is there a way to force the entire Word document to be consistently encoded? Or a way to detect segments that are already in Unicode, and tell the conversion macro to skip those segments?