Ancient History (aka the 1970s-1990s)
In the "bad old days" computers did not understand non-Roman alphabets (like much in this post this is a gross over-simplification, if that troubles you you are in the wrong place - try Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources for a more complete presentation). To overcome this biblical scholars (at least those who were also geeky enough to want to process words in Hebrew, Greek...) needed to install special fonts that fooled the poor machine into thinking that a lowercase "x" looked like this: ח or, on other occasions like this: Χ, in other words the font represented Hebrew, Greek etc. characters, while telling the computer that they were proper American ones (the coding system was called ASCII "American Standard Code for Information Interchange").This was simple, until you wanted to give your document (on a "floppy" remember those - once they were floppy too!) to someone else. At that point they had fun decyphering text like this: "d#r&k m*H$s@" and most gave up saying "It's all Greek to me!" at which point one informed them gently that it was actually Aramaic and everything went downhill from there!
I've seen the present - and it works!
All that is changing.
WindowsXP and most programs designed for it (like your Wordprocessor or Browser) understand Unicode. Like ASCII, Unicode represents characters by number codes. Unlike ASCII (which only had 128 characters, 33 of which wouldn't print anyway!) Unicode even in its simpler forms has THOUSANDS of characters so "x" means x and not ח or Χ which each just stand for themselves. And... when you send your document to someone else there is a very good chance the "foreign" alphabets will be readable, even if still without good fonts they may not be pretty. (The sad exception to this is complex accents and the like which risk showing up as little rectangles. The good news is though that whatever font they download that contains these signs will display them this sometimes looks untidy, but it is way more readable than "d#r&k m*H$s@".)
How to do it: Unicode for (Biblical Scholarly) Dummies
It is not difficult, just download the Tyndale House Font Kit. Install it, (you can pretty much take the defaults), so that basically means a double click after you download and then double click again on the install file.
After installation, at the bottom of your screen you will see a new little square with two letters (these represent the language you are using, EN = English, FR = French etc. - for these purposes Americans are understood to be using "English" ;-) If you click on the button (once will do, do NOT get overenthusiastic, Jean) you will see a popup like this:
This will allow you to select Greek or Hebrew as your input language (temporarily) Greek includes transliteration characters for Hebrew transcriptions too (just use shift lock). At first you will probably need the keyboard layout, so print out the file called: Keyboards.doc in the C:\Program Files\Tyndale Unicode Font Kit directory.
That's all folks!
Post Scriptum:
Except to add that as Daniel mentions in his comment below:
Thanks, Daniel, yes it has been a good feature that Logos adopted early, Bibleworks is still playing catch up in cutting and pasting.Another cool thing about Unicode is that when you copy and paste text into your word processor from a program like Logos Bible Software the fonts just...work. This painlessness is what persuaded Logos to adopt the Unicode Way back in 2001...
BW users need to know that they have to go: |Tools| |Options| |Fonts| and tell the program that the "Export Fonts" should be Unicode, rather like this:
Post Scriptum II
Daniel (below) also points to Windows Keyboards for Ancient Languages as well as Greek and Hebrew (and transliteration) include also Syriac and one tailored for the entry of Coptic. If you have Logos installed these are probably both the easiest and best Unicode keyboards to use. If you use BibleWorks or another (non-Unicode) program then the Tyndale Font Kit is probably the easiest way to go. Either way your text will be readable by more people! (Everyone using WinXP+ or MacOSX+ if you use no accents... for accents they will require a suitable scholarly Unicode font but it does not matter which one they have :)
Post Scriptum III
Bible Texts in Unicode (for cut and paste if you do not have Logos and can't make BibleWorks export in Unicode):
- TanakhML Hebrew Bible Browser (nb. at the right under "Display" you have a choice of turning vowels, accents and other marks "On" or "Off" to make your text maximally readable turn accents "Off" - they will show as little empty boxes for people without the specialised fonts, while the basic consonants and vowels should display OK even for them)
- Greek NT and LXX
Labels: biblical.studies.online, greek, hebrew, open.biblical.studies
¶ 8:39 AM
[to Del.icio.us]
Yup, yup, yup. Right on all counts. The Tyndale Unicode thing is the best invention since they learned to slice bread (and call it a scone) and brew Starbucks.
By 
Jim, at
June 14, 2007 9:19 AM
Oh, much better than falsely advertising bread as scones ;-) this does what it says, does what is needed and does it easily. I made the post because three times in the last week I've had to help people who are, or are becoming, biblical scholars but who were having problems typing or letting others read the basic languages.
From now on I'll just send them the URL!
So, if anyone finds the instructions difficult or don't work please SAY, so I can fix them...
By 
Tim, at
June 14, 2007 9:27 AM
Ah yes, the brave new world of standards! :-)
Another cool thing about Unicode is that when you copy and paste text into your word processor from a program like Logos Bible Software the fonts just...work. This painlessness is what persuaded Logos to adopt the Unicode Way back in 2001 when it was first (barely) supported by Windows. But WinXP sure does offer fuller and easier Unicode support!
Here's another freebie: anyone in need of a good Coptic or Syriac keyboard can download one at no charge here.
By Daniel Foster, at
June 14, 2007 11:29 AM
Well, Rick Brannan (of Ricoblog fame) tells me he's pretty sure Logos used Unicode internally to the app as far back as 1995, when Logos Library System 2.0 was released. He says, "We didn't export unicode (by default ... but you could set it up) since almost no apps supported it in Win 3.x."
I stand corrected.
From the war stories I hear from veteran Logos developers, I think "bleeding edge" aptly describes the experience of working with Unicode back then.
By Daniel Foster, at
June 14, 2007 1:33 PM
A great invention, indeed, Jim, but not Tyndale House's. They only copied it. As mentioned on their own page, SBL and SIL among others had done more or less the same first, and several years ago.
Disclaimer: I worked on the some of the supporting files for the SIL Hebrew Unicode font package, and also provided some input to the SBL Hebrew font developers. And I was using Unicode Hebrew on Windows 95 - yes, you could make it work (if you didn't worry about precise accent positioning) even on that platform, with Word 97 and IE5.
By Peter Kirk, at
June 15, 2007 11:05 AM
Another nice site that helps simplify setup is GreekGeek.net.
By mgvh, at
June 17, 2007 5:03 PM
Daniel
I sometimes complain about the way default installations of Logos "take over", and so slow, my machine - I wish it were easier to turn off the "clever stuff"! But, I have been hugely impressed by the way Logos has consistently been at the forefront of significant technological and standards breakthroughs - I think XML is another case in point!
[BTW I will move your link to the Logos keyboards into the text as well in case anyone does not read the comments :( ]
Peter
I should probably have mentioned SIL, except the post was not intended to be a History of Unicode for Biblical Studies, just a quick and dirty instruction sheet for the perplexed and techno-phobic. But you are right, SIL were helpful early adopters!
Mark
Greek Geek and hopefully soon Hebrew Geek are really useful sites. However, I did not mention them as their focus is on BibleWorks "legacy" fonts, not Unicode, if people install the BW fonts from there (aside from being of dubious legality because of copyright) text they type in Greek will only be readable to others with the BW fonts installed. Just the situation that Unicode helps us avoid!
By Tim, at
June 18, 2007 6:50 AM
