Typing Hebrew in the Search w/ Vista and BW8

I am new to Bibleworks, 8.0 is the first version I have tried. So far I have been unsuccessful at typing Hebrew (and to some extent Greek) in the Search command line. For Hebrew I am trying to use the Israeli Keyboard. In the BW editor the Keyboard works as expected, but in the Search window the characters appear as accented Latin characters.

I have tried searches by typing a period and then typing the equivalent keystrokes for the word I want to search on and every search fails and often BW crashes and has to be restarted. I have even tried simply copying text from the Hebrew bible in BW and pasting the text into the search window and although I do get some Hebrew characters, they are the wrong Hebrew characters and often have a lot of garbage characters mixed in. When I copy unpointed text typed into the editor window and paste it into the search window, I get vowel pointings (that were not in the text) without any of the original Hebrew letters (that were in the text)? Example אהבה when pasted into the search command line becomes a segol and a sheva, but all of the Hebrew letters themselves are lost.

I have tried setting the language option to manual and auto select; in auto the correct langauge is indicated on the vista status bar (bottom right part of the Screen) when the search text is set for Hebrew.

Obviously there are a lot of bugs still yet to be fixed, but I am wondering if anyone has a work around for the time being?

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Originally Posted by benelchi

I am new to Bibleworks, 8.0 is the first version I have tried. So far I have been unsuccessful at typing Hebrew (and to some extent Greek) in the Search command line.

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I may be wrong, but it sounds to me that you do not have the correct version as your search version.

In the Command Line, first type WTT to make that your active search version. Now type in a period and then type your Hebrew characters. It should work. If not, then something is wrong.

The Search version always shows WTT, and when I have the language set to automatic it chooses Hebrew (as indicated by Vista) when the WTT version is selected as the search version. I did try forcing WTT as you suggested, but it didn't make a difference. After the . was entered I still get the accented/tildied latin characters.

One other interesting note. When using the graphical keyboard to enter the Hebrew characters. The first letter after the space follows the key definition displayed on the keyboard (using the mouse to click the key), but the subsequent characters use the Israeli keyboard definition (as set in my language preferences rather that the pictured letters. For example, the first click on a 'hey' produces a 'hey', but the next time a 'hey' is clicked I get a 'yod' (like an Israeli keyboard would produce). The key definitions remain Israeli until I get to another space.

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Originally Posted by benelchi

The Search version always shows WTT, and when I have the language set to automatic it chooses Hebrew (as indicated by Vista) when the WTT version is selected as the search version.

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The only thing I can suggest is to play with the options, such as turning off automatic language selection, etc., and see if that fixes it. I would also email BibleWorks support and fill them in on your problem. You should probably enclose your ini files in the email so they can take a look at them. You can easily do this by going to About | System Info | Include ini files, then copy to clipboard, save it as text file and include it with your email.

So it sounds like your problem has to do with using the Israeli keyboard? I personally haven't ever used that option, so I can't compare notes, but did you do all the necessary steps for setting that up? Right now it sounds like there's a problem with the language setup in Vista compared to what BibleWorks is expecting/using.

From what I can tell, I have correctly set all of the language settings, the problem appears to be just S/W bugs. I may try and set the keyboard settings back to non-Israeli settings and just use the graphics keyboard for the time being. Are you using 8.0 and how well is the Hebrew functioning for you with the non-Israeli settings?


Side note: I have been able to pretty consistently crash bible works by searching for Hebrew text (when the search text is not found). Fortunately, I realized I don't need to submit the search because the text turns red when the results will not be found before even hitting the return key.

With WTT as search version, type a period, then Chet, qamets, mem

If it doesn't show up in Hebrew, try hitting ctrl + page down. This is a toggle that shifts between ascii and Hebrew font display.

Initially that didn't seem to work, but after typing the mem I got a mem sophit. And then when I cleared out the text and typed again everything worked!!!

When it did start working, I did notice that the . moved from the '/' key to the '.' key (where it is on an English Keyboard. I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to type a Tsadi sophit, but realized that the normal Tsadi was automatically a sophit when it was on the end of the word. Other than the sophit letters everyting seems to work as expected (and now I can type!)

Thanks.

Although I have now got things working for Hebrew (sort of), it is still quite buggy. The key to getting the Hebrew characters to function seems to be having the caps lock enabled. (required on an MS Israeli Keyboard to type a qamats); however, sometimes having the caps lock on causes the insertion of a daggash/mapiq in every letter, and when that happens I have been unable to get the tab to work correctly even when other tabs are working correctly.

Greek doesnt seem to work at all (Caps locks enabled or not). However, unlike the Hebrew problem I always get Greek characters (or accents) but I haven't figured out the KB mapping because it doesn't seem to match either the MS Greek or the BW Greek and like the MS Greek keyboard the order of the keys pressed does make a difference.

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Originally Posted by benelchi

Greek doesnt seem to work at all (Caps locks enabled or not). However, unlike the Hebrew problem I always get Greek characters (or accents) but I haven't figured out the KB mapping because it doesn't seem to match either the MS Greek or the BW Greek and like the MS Greek keyboard the order of the keys pressed does make a difference.

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Where or how doesn't the Greek work? On the button bar, about the sixth button from the right is a little alpha, if you click on that, it shows the default layout for the Greek keyboard in BibleWorks.