This is a very helpful piece of work. Thanks Mary. I do have one correction and a clarification.
Correction:
p. 9, “A downside to unicode is that Microsoft Word 2011 cannot read unicode fonts that are exported to it.”
This is only true of Hebrew (and other right-to-left languages). It handles Unicode polytonic Greek text just fine and has for at least the last 3 major versions. Unfortunately in Accordance one has to pick Unicode or not for *both* Greek and Hebrew. It would make life much easier for Word users if these could be toggled separately, in which case I'd always want Unicode for Greek, but usually not for Hebrew.
See the
Unicode for Biblical Studies page on my web site if Unicode is a foreign concept to you.
(BTW, "Unicode" is always capitalized.)
p. 10, “You might choose to export original languages in Accordance fonts. The upside here is that they are generally more beautiful and easy to read than the unicode fonts available when you choose to export Accordance data in unicode.”
A major advantage to using Unicode is that you can change the font to any Unicode font that supports polytonic Greek, e.g., Gentium, SBL Greek, Ezra SIL, Cardo, Minion Pro, Palatino Linotype, Lucida Grande, etc. A number of these could well be described as "beautiful." Accordance's Helena is functional, but it's not particularly attractive or legible when compared with, say, Gentium. (It's a better looking text font than my own, old [now deprecated] Galilee font, but that isn't saying a lot!) An exported file may open in some ugly font like Helvetica or Arial, but it certainly doesn't need to remain in that font.
Edited by Rod Decker, 20 December 2011 - 08:40 PM.
Rodney J. Decker, ThD
Professor of NT & Greek
Baptist Bible Seminary
NTResources.com/blog/