Converting to Lowercase and Small Caps

Marcela has a document in which there are many instances of phrases such as "century XXI" where the only thing that changes is the Roman numerals. She would like all instances of Roman numerals following the word "century" to be converted to lowercase small caps. (This is necessary so that the small caps look correct.) Marcela wonders if there is a way to do this using Find and Replace.

When you format text as small caps, anything that is a capital letter looks the same as the unformatted version of the text. Anything that is lowercase, however, looks like a "small" version of a capital letter. Thus, the name small caps. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Text showing effect of small caps on uppercase and lowercase letters (XXI).

This difference in how uppercase and lowercase is displayed by small caps is why Marcela indicated that she needed to both convert the Roman numerals to lowercase and format them as small caps.

Unfortunately, there is no ability within Find and Replace to change the case of letters. You can easily use a wildcard search to apply the Small Caps attribute to the Roman numerals, but not to change them to lowercase. In order to do that, you will need to use a macro:

Sub ConvertRomans()
    Dim aRange As Range

    Set aRange = ActiveDocument.Range
    With aRange.Find
        .ClearFormatting
        .MatchWildcards = True
        .Text = "century [MDCLXVI]{1,}>"
        Do While .Execute
            With aRange
                .MoveStart Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
                .Text = LCase(aRange.Text)
                .Font.SmallCaps = True
                .Collapse direction:=wdCollapseEnd
            End With
        Loop
    End With
End Sub

This macro uses a wildcard search to find any instances of "century" followed by Roman numerals. If an instance is located, then the word "century" is excluded from the range that was found, meaning that only the Roman numerals remain. These are then converted to lowercase and the Small Caps attribute applied. The search continues, until such point as nothing more is found. (The macro runs very quickly, even in large documents.)

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