BW9: copying Hebrew into Word text

[MBD]

I know this has to have been thoroughly discussed, but I cannot find the thread. When I copy a Hebrew text from BW9 into a Word 2010 table, the Hebrew comes across as hopelessly garbled. I like to use the table with a row of two cells to show Hebrew and either Greek or English as a parallel; then I set the table not to show lines. However, the Hebrew is a monster. Even when I set its cell to right-left, there are three or four text garbles for even a short verse. I use the SBL Hebrew as the font. Please email me at dick@siena.edu with a solution.

[DavidR]

I know this isn't really an answer to your question, but have you considered an alternative Word Processor? Nota Bene is designed from the ground up for multilingual, scholarly use, including especially biblical languages. It pastes in Hebrew copied from BW easily. Admittedly, its table functions are not as slick as Word's. But I did just create a simple two-column table, and pasted Hebrew verses from BW9 into it flawlessly. If you're interested, see http://www.notabene.com/.

[jimofbentley]

Admittedly I am using BW8, but I have no trouble with copying Hebrew text into a table.

I tried cut & paste.
Drag & drop.
ctrl-shft-B

All worked well.

Does BW9 work for you when inserting into a regular Word document, i.e. not into a table?

Is the SBL Hebrew font properly installed and available to Word? (I had problems with this at first).

Just for fun, I copied Genesis 1:1 into an Excel table. I had to change the font in the table from Arial to SBL Hebrew, but it still copied properly.

I hope that someone can offer you a solution.

[brainout]

I know this has to have been thoroughly discussed, but I cannot find the thread. When I copy a Hebrew text from BW9 into a Word 2010 table, the Hebrew comes across as hopelessly garbled. I like to use the table with a row of two cells to show Hebrew and either Greek or English as a parallel; then I set the table not to show lines. However, the Hebrew is a monster. Even when I set its cell to right-left, there are three or four text garbles for even a short verse. I use the SBL Hebrew as the font. Please email me at dick@siena.edu with a solution.

It's glitchy, even in older versions of Word. Best luck I had was with Word 2000. There's an old add-in from BibleWorks 5, which adjusts the Hebrew text better. When Word updates came through from MS, they essentially updated Word to 2002, and then I lost use of the add-in. So what happens is that the text won't come in as right to left; so in a multiple line paste, the beginning of the sentence drops down one line. So it's bass-ackwards.

So the same problem might be happening to you in Word 2010. The solution I came up with in Word 2002, was to paste only the amount of text that would fit on one line, at a time. Key to that, is to make the export font the same size as you'll want it to appear in your Word document. I don't use SBL Hebrew for this purpose, but I wouldn't expect the issue to change. The best size I've seen in Word documents is 18-22 points, but when I exported Daniel 9, I was able to get it smaller, post-paste (the vowel points get squished, though).

If worse comes to worse, you can get MS Office XP Professional 2000 at Amazon for under $50. I just bought another copy this morning. It will install on Win7, so long as you don't use Outlook; so select Custom Install. I'm told the same is true for Win8, and apparently true even in 64-bit edition, though MS' official position is that no Office product before 2003 is compatible in Win7 et seq. (I learned all this in PC World forum back in August, from users there, when I was qvetching about MS Office and Win7 incompatibility. One guy even claimed he was able to run Office 97 on Win8.)

In short, you CAN paste to a Word table -- I did it with Psalm 90, idea of Hebrew on top, my translation below, each line/verse; but if you know the line is going to run over, then only paste the portions one line at a time. That's what I did with Psalm 90 (table begins on page 9 of that doc).

Finally, when installing and using BW8 I noticed they had different Export and Output Format Options which might solve the problem. I've not yet tested those.

[johns]

There's an old add-in from BibleWorks 5 ...

Finally, when installing and using BW8 I noticed they had different Export and Output Format Options which might solve the problem. I've not yet tested those.

I'm pretty sure back in the days of BW5 you werent exporting Unicode to Word.

[brainout]

I'm pretty sure back in the days of BW5 you werent exporting Unicode to Word.

True. It was an export of the bw fonts. But it worked until MS changed Word 2000 so much, the add-in didn't work.