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Be patient with me all you computer buffs! :o I see from my newly installed BW7 that it can export Greek and Hebrew fonts as unicode. As far as I can see, unicode is an attempt to represent all languages for those people who have Windows XP. Does this mean, if I export in unicode and then post the exported text in an e-mail, someone with Windows XP will see the Greek and Hebrew, even though they don't have Bibleworks fonts on their machine?
Yes and no. This is the reason why BW isn't (yet) 100% Unicode: not all computers can properly handle Unicode fonts. So if you email someone who is running an email client that specifically does support Unicode, it shouldn't be a problem. But not all email programs support it completely, so it still can be kind of hit and miss, but Unicode is the way of the future, so in the end, yes what you said is what the goal is supposed to be, but right now it may not always turn out that way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Crawford
You are correct. Unicode provides standards for where each character is located in the overall font set, so you no longer need to worry about having a proprietary (TrueType) font. (Bwgreekl, Bwhebl, etc are all TrueType, not Unicode, fonts.) WinXP has built in Unicode support, but this only means that the characters will show up correctly in one of the built in Unicode fonts (Arial Unicode MS, Tahoma, one version of TimesNewRoman).
I have tried to explain Unicode briefly HERE, but there are links on that page to much more information. I would especially encourage you to download/install fonts that really are more attractive than the WinXP standards.
I like Cardo for the Greek (and it does also include most of the Hebrew you would ever need), but the SBLHebrew font is likely to become an academic standard for Hebrew.
thank you, Greg, for asking the question, and gentlemen, for your answers. i'm liking bw7 more and more, even though change is a challenge.
Here is a free unicode keyboard that has Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and many others.
http://imtranslator.net/keyboard.asp
Mark, does this mean that both the sender and receiver must have Cardo installed on their computer to receive the benefit of Cardo font; or will it suffice for the sender to have it?
You can choose which Unicode font you want to use on your computer as long as you have it on your computer. What happens if you use Cardo, for example, and someone else does not have that font and tries to read a file you created? On a WinXP system, it will default to one of the other Unicode fonts that is on the system. So, the characters will come out correctly, but it just won't be the same font style.
A little earlier in this thread Mark G. Vitalis Hoffman
said: "Bwgreekl, Bwhebl, etc are all TrueType, not Unicode, fonts."
This statement seems to imply that TrueType and Unicode are mutually exclusive terms, which is definitely not correct.
Bwgreekl, Bwhebl, etc., are TrueType fonts that use an older encoding scheme instead of Unicode. But there are many TrueType fonts that do use Unicode encoding. TrueType is a font technology, while Unicode is an encoding scheme. Most Unicode polytonic Greek fonts that I am familiar with (e.g., Galatia SIL, Gentium, Cardo) are TrueType fonts.
My statement remains correct ("Bwgreekl, Bwhebl, etc are all TrueType, not Unicode, fonts."), but you indeed are even more correct in noting the difference between TrueType font technology and Unicode encoding schemes! Thanks.
I have downloaded the Cardo zipped file. After unzipping it, there are 3 files (a .txt file for installation instruction, a .pdf file for the Manual and the font file). I follow the instruction and copied the Cardo file into the Fonts folder of WinXP.
However, when I choose this font for Greek and/or Hebrew (replacing the default BW Greek and Hebrew fonts) for displaying verses in the Results Window of my BW6, garbage characters appear.
I cannot think of anything that I have done wrong. Any suggestion?
Thanks.