SPTiberian and Windows XP

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Ela_Lazarewicz
         
I am working on a Microsoft Word document in English, in which I want to replace all the passages, words and phrases in biblical Hebrew with unpunctuated SPTiberian, HebraicaII or BWHebb (those passages, words and phrases were originally copied from Davka but in my computer they appear in Times New Roman Hebrew font).
I am using MS Word for Windows XP.

I have the following problems:

1) When I try to *copy and paste* the relevant passages from a Bible search tool which uses SPTiberian, the characters are automatically converted into Times New Roman Hebrew font (the right-to-left text flow is preserved). If I highlight the passage and try to convert the font again, I can only do that into David, Aharoni, FranRuehl or another MSWord Hebrew font (but not into any of the above Biblical Hebrew fonts).

2) When I try to *type* in SPTiberian, HebraicaII or BWHebb in the *right-to-left* flow, I automatically get Times New Roman, or another of the Microsoft Office Hebrew font.
The only way in which I can make those Biblical Hebrew characters to appear is to type
them in the Western, left-to-right flow, i.e. in reverse order (in order to type Hebrew 'davar', I would have to type resh first, then bet and end with dalet).

It seems to have something to do with the way in which the character
map is defined for those fonts in the Windows XP Word edition installed on my computer
(the SPTiberian, HebraicaII and BWHebb character maps are defined only
for English/Western keyboard input. When I switch to Hebrew keyboard mode, in order to get right-to-left flow, Word tries to read from Hebrew character set, which is not
defined in SPTiberian, so it switches automatically to Times New Roman font, or another Microsoft Office font in which the Hebrew character map is defined).

However, I do not experience any of those problems when I use the SBLHebrew font (I can freely convert the pasted passages into SBLHebrew and type in the right-to-left text flow), which makes me think that there is an incompatibility between the older biblical Hebrew fonts and Windows XP.

Has anyone experienced similar difficulties? Perhaps there is a way of going around them?
I would be more than grateful for an advice or at least a confirmation of my guesses about the reasons of those problems!

Many thanks,
Ela Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska
         

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: John Hudson
         
The SPTiberian font and others of a similar kind use custom encodings, not the standard Unicode encoding used in Word. From your description, it sounds as if your Bible search tool uses a Unicode export filter when copying and pasting to Word, so what happens is that the custom encoding is being translated into Unicode, so it can be correctly displayed in Unicode apps, but not using the custom encoded fonts.

The custom encoding is hack that assigns Hebrew characters to 8-bit ANSI characters that, in Unicode, are always Latin letters, punctuation, etc. This means, among other things, that they are not really right-to-left characters, but are only displayed as such in special applications that recognise the custom encoding. When you copy text from such an application, what generally happens is that multiple formats of the text are saved to the clipboard: if you paste into another application that recognises the custom encoding, it will probably select the format that allows you to continue working with that encoding, but if you paste into a Unicode application it will select a Unicode export format if one exists (if one doesn't you will get gibberish).

SBL Hebrew is a Unicode font, which explains why you do not experience the same problems with it.
         

[ArchivePoster]

Posted by: Ela_Lazarewicz
         
John, thanks so much for your reply from ages ago - can't believe I forgot to reply earlier! Sorry about that!  You were right and I ended up typing the whole thing in SPTiberian backwards... Thanks again. All best, Ela
         

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