Font Questions

[Ingo Sorke]

A publisher is requiring final document submission with SPIonic and SPTiberian + Mac Office Word 2011.

 

Does anyone have experience with these fonts?

 

I have my Preferences set to Export as those fonts with Unicode checked. "Edit - Copy As Style Only" works great (the keyboard shortcut ⌘-[ does not), but the font in Word says Geneva for Greek, and Yehudit for Hebrew.

 

- Just making sure I'm getting SPIonic and SPTiberian in my Word document.

- The Hebrew font comes out small in Word - any way to default the Export to 16 or 18?

 

Thanks,

 

Ingo

[jpkang]

Unicode can't be checked if you want to export in legacy encodings such as those used for the SP fonts.

 

Re: the font size, you can do a global search and replace to boost the font size after you've imported everything, but the bigger issue will be making sure that you have the correct line breaks for any SPTiberian strings that break across two or more lines.

[Ingo Sorke]

Funny thing is . . . it works with Unicode checked. Unicode unchecked only delivers a transliteration mess.

And I can't resist . . . in Bibleworks it all works with a simple font selection, then highlight/copy/paste. Voila.

[David Lang]

Ingo,

 

You've been popping up on everyone's forums today, but I think you're being a little premature in declaring BibleWorks easier than Accordance in this respect.

 

I just unchecked Export as Unicode and selected SPIonic and SPTiberian in the Greek and Hebrew settings. Then selected Greek text, copied, and pasted into TextEdit. The text appeared properly in SPIonic. With respect to Hebrew, be sure to check Reverse direction of Hebrew characters, but that worked with a simple copy and paste as well.

 

As far as font size is concerned, it will copy the text at whatever size it is in Accordance. If you want Hebrew text to be 16 or 18 points, size the text that way in Accordance. If you don't want to do that, you can have Accordance paste at a standard font size by setting that size in the Citation preferences and then using Copy As Citation.

 

Copy As Style Only does not copy the text at all, it copies the Style information of a selection and than applies that style when you use Paste Style. For example, if you created an 18 point bold title in your user notes and you wanted a quick way to apply that style to other text, you would select the title and use Copy as Style Only, then select other text and use Paste Style to format it as 18 point bold.

 

I hope this clears up any confusion. If the text you paste in Word is not appearing in SPIonic or SPTiberian, I suspect it's a Word issue.

[Ingo Sorke]

Thanks for responding!

 

Yes, I'm checking all the forums because I need to settle on one platform for a project and want to make an educated choice based on my and others' experience. I can invest in electronic resources only for one platform - a longterm decision, and hoping for minimal forum and tech support needs down the road.

 

A simple copy/paste into Word does not do the trick for me, neither Greek nor Hebrew, even with Unicode unchecked. I do too much Greek/Hebrew work every day to live with anything but a straightforward copy/paste implementation with Word.

 

One other example: I bought the Accordance Greek Syntax module, installed fine, but I couldn't find it anywhere in the program.

In Bibleworks: Resources, Misc, Leedy's - Done. Simple. Accordance? Yet another phone call/Skype with Helen (who deserves a double salary) to figure that one out. It all seems to require too much tweaking, file moving, etc.

 

The amount of Bible translations (including foreign ones) in "that other program" in the default package is also unrivaled.

 

I'm sorry . . . I gave it an honest try, incl. a 12-hour seminar. I wished I had better news.

 

Who would have thought that someone would use the words "It just works, intuitive, and Windows" all in the same sentence?!

 

Blessings,

 

Ingo

[David Lang]

Ingo,

 

Just to be clear, you've unchecked Export as Unicode AND chosen the SPIonic and SPTiberian options in the pop-ups below, right? For Hebrew, you have also checked the Reverse direction checkbox.

 

After you've made those preference changes, you are then copying Greek or Hebrew text, switching to Word, and using the simple Paste command. Correct? The preference changes do not apply to copied text retroactively, so I want to be sure you are copying text again once you've changed the preferences.

 

When you say a simple copy/paste does not do the trick for you, what exactly do you mean? Is the text being converted to the right characters but not being pasted in the correct font? You can tell that by selecting the text in Word and placing it in the right font. If it looks right, Word is losing the font info somehow. If it looks wrong, then it's not exporting to the right characters. If you can post a screenshot of what you're getting, that would help.

[Ingo Sorke]

Yes, followed all those steps religiously - no success.

By copy/paste I mean highlight Greek/Hebrew text, copy, switch to Word, then paste.

 

Working on a deadline, but might pursue it another time.

 

Thanks!

[Ingo Sorke]

Interesting comment from a Logos tech support - added here for the sake of discussion and inquiry, not to start a war of words (or Word?!):

 

"In addition to having the font present on your system, you also need software capable of reading that font and laying out its glyphs correctly. Ancient Hebrew is a very complex script, and Apple incredibly poor support for it: there are even certain sequences of characters that, when laid out with a line break at a particular point, will crash any application that doesn't have an explicit workaround!

 

Microsoft has very good support for laying out Hebrew text in Windows, but they did not bring this code to the Mac version of Office, instead choosing to rely on Apple's text layout system.

 

If you need to see Hebrew text properly laid out, you need to use a specific font, and you need to use Microsoft Word, then you need to use Windows.

 

There's no way around that."

 

I'm don't want to add Mellel and thus yet another program to the mix.

 

Ingo

[David Lang]

Ingo,

 

The developer who wrote that is misunderstanding what you're trying to do. He's talking about how Apple and Microsoft support Unicode Hebrew, while you're wanting to paste in Hebrew text using a non-unicode font. As I understand it, Logos cannot do that at all, while BibleWorks and Accordance can.

 

The reason some people recommend getting Mellel over MS Word is because of its superior rendering of Unicode Hebrew, which again is not relevant to your situation.

 

I'm still not sure why you're not seeing text exported from Accordance showing up in the SP fonts, and since I don't have MS Word, I can't verify the behavior you describe. It has worked for me with a simple copy and paste in every word processor I own.

 

Can anyone with MS Word verify whether text exported from Accordance as SPIonic and SPTiberian are losing the font when pasted into Word?

[Ingo Sorke]

Thank you, David. I very much appreciate you pursuing this with me. I'm not trying to be difficult.

 

Just upgraded to 9.1, restart, those fonts selected confirmed in Preferences, Unicode unchecked, OK.

Then copy/paste into Word (2011) - still just a transliterated font result.

 

Edit - Copy As - Style Only - Paste - produces Greek and Hebrew text perfectly in Word - Word just doesn't identify it as those SBL fonts.

 

I'll work on Word and SBL fonts some more and look into that - I'm glad Accordance appears to be quite capable of what I'm looking for.

And then this afternoon the publisher told me that they're looking into a Unicode font solution since the projects involves many people on Windows and Mac.

 

Thanks again,

 

Ingo