UTF-8 needed!

[hiperSPEED]

BW uses specific fonts for displaying Greek or Hebrew verses. Is there any way for using Unicode/UTF-8 instead of them? Or, how to convert Greek verses(eg. Gen 1:1 evn avrch/| evpoi,hsen o` qeo.j to.n ouvrano.n kai. th.n gh/) into unicode enties like &#number; ?

The problem appears if someone would like to write an article and share it the others on the web. MS Word format is useless here. He or she has to use HTML. So UTF-8 (or Unicode HTML enties) are needed there. Without it there is no way for using any passages in Greek or Hebrew.

[jdarlack]

I completely agree with your desire to see unicode used in BW. Though I have not yet figured out how to "type" unicode into a document, I certainly see its advantage for publishing things that most folks can read regardless of the fonts installed.

You may want to look at Charlie's comments about Bibleworks and Unicode. I know that unicode support is coming in the future, but Bibleworks has delayed implementing it because:

1. Unicode Hebrew is not completely bug free yet.
2. A very large percentage of BibleWorks users are not using computers with new enough operating systems to support unicode.

Please read Charlie's post!

[MGVH]

I've been struggling with the same issue. Here are some workarounds I've used:
1) Export/print your MSWord file as a PDF file. (Not a perfect solution since fonts can sometimes still be an issue.) If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, OpenOffice (free!) has a built in PDF exporter that works great.
2) John Kendall (who is a member on this list) provided me with a MSWord macro that he recorded that changes bwgreek to Unicode. (He uses Palatino Linotype, but when you set up the macro, you can change to what you want. I prefer Cardo.) He very graciously shared it with me. Perhaps one of the BW resource sites would be willing to post his 195Kb txt file. (You will need to know how to take his txt file and convert it to a Word macro.)

[jdarlack]

Mark,

If you can send me the file, I will be happy to post it to the "Master List of BibleWorks Add-Ons"! It sounds like an excellent workaround! Do you know of any macro for converting BWHEBB to unicode?

~Jim D.

[hiperSPEED]

This approach is used in open-source The Sword Project (http://www.crosswire.org/sword). Maybe it could help for BW as well?

http://www.ccel.org/info/gkheb/readme.txt
http://www.ccel.org/info/gkheb/

[Joshua Luna]

While Unicode is still has some kinks (and is a pain on older Operating Systems), I look forward to when BW does offer it. I was just browsing this morning a Hebrew text online that is in Unicode and copied it into a table in a word. When you scale the table larger and smaller the text flowed correctly. While this is not a BW problem, I do look forward to when I can copy and paste Hebrew text and then text edit it and not cringe every time I make a font size change or change the borders on the page.

Edit => This was the link I was referring to above:
http://users.ntplx.net/~kimball/Tanach/Tanach.xml

I would be interested in a bwhebb conversion macro also (maybe to the new SBL unicode font?). What are others doing on websites with the fonts? I have found that the only "safe" way so far has been to make the Hebrew text a graphic... any other ideas? I do not have BW6, which I guess fixed some text display issues with their font... I am a little behind the times I think :/

Joshua

[Charlie]

...What are others doing on websites with the fonts?
Joshua

Joshua,

The only way you can be sure the people viewing your website are seeing what you intended them to see is to be sure they have the same fonts installed. Many websites use the BibleWorks fonts and then provide a link to the page on our website where they can get the BibleWorks fonts for free.

http://www.bibleworks.com/fonts.html

Using Unicode at this point will leave many of your website visitors in the dark, since they don't have a computer that supports Unicode. This is changing everyday, and eventually Unicode will solve many of our font headaches, but we're not there yet. For now the best method of sharing documents with Greek and Hebrew text (websites, Word docs, PDF's etc.) is to make sure the recipient gets the fonts along with the document. You can also look into font embedding which basically puts font information into the document itself.

I hope this is helpful.
Charlie