Re: [be] Install of Bibledit-Gtk 4.3 on MacOS X 10.7.1

[Neil Mayhew]

Hi Maurice,

I think your problems with text display and input are the result of the 
X11 environment on Mac OS being separate from the native Aqua 
environment, and not sharing its font and keyboard capability.

It is possible to have MacPorts install a native version of GTK, and 
have Bibledit use that. I believe text display and input would then work 
correctly, although there might be a few more minor glitches since the 
Aqua version of GTK isn't officially supported. I haven't tried Bibledit 
with GTK-Aqua myself yet, so I can't give exact instructions, 
unfortunately. I have tried other applications with it in the past, and 
found they were mostly fairly successful. Doing this with Bibledit has 
been on my to-do list for a long time, but since you may be interested 
I'll try to bring that closer to the top of the list.

In brief, you would need to do:

sudo port install gtk2 cairo pango +quartz

Let me know if you try this and have any success.

If your only purpose in using Bibledit is to generate OSIS from SFM, I 
assume you can still do that despite the problems you mentioned. 
However, for Bibledit to be useful for anything else, them these issues 
do need to be addressed.

--Neil

On 2011-09-27 4:57 AM Maurice Bauhahn wrote:
> Hello from a newbie!
>
> Happily I was able to install Bibledit-Gtk 4.3 on a MacOS X 10.7.1 (Lion) in Cambodia 
> even though it involved downloading 3GB of Xcode and a surprisingly long amount of 
> time in sudo port install<>.
>
> The intent was to open *.SFM files for a couple Khmer Bible translations and 
> then export in OSIS format to create some GO Bible *.jar files.
>
> Although the application seems to have installed satisfactorily, I've 
> encountered some significant issues:
>
> (1) As others have noted, the keyboard settings in Lion are not recognised in 
> the X11 app like Bibledit, so I cannot type in Khmer. I'm not aware of anyone 
> creating Khmer keyboards for X11 on Mac. Khmer fonts and a Khmer keyboard were 
> introduced to the MacOS with Lion (10.7.0). Similarly Windows 7 includes Khmer 
> fonts and keyboard as well!
>
> (2) Even though I picked a font (Khmer Mondulkiri) which should have both AAT and 
> OpenType tables, the text did not obey the ''features" so subscripts were 
> replaced with a '+' sign and a following base line character and there are a fair 
> number of dotted circle characters and odd spacing (presumably trying to fully 
> justify text). Khmer is a complex scripts so depends heavily on that added 
> intelligence in the fonts.
>
> (3) Quite possibly some of my problems are that the content was all entered 
> into Paratext with a tilde (~) for word break and a circumflex (^) for syllable 
> breaks. This would make what might seem to be extraordinarily long words. It 
> would be helpful if there was a way to register other forms of word break than 
> space (considered ugly in Khmer typography…spaces are used for phrase break; 
> not for word break). Another side effect appeared to be a lack of recognition 
> of chapter and verse in 'Checking'…I doubt that there are over 200 faults for 
> that in the Hammond Bible files.
>
> This is not a major issue for the Bible Society in Cambodia as they have 
> Paratext, but it would be helpful in the long run to have such issues 
> addressed. Unfortunately my XML export from Paratext was not sufficient as an 
> import to GO Bible…but possibly a newer Paratext will help to resolve that.
>
> In the meantime Kahunapule Michael Johnson has done some wonderful scripting 
> from *.SFM to HTML with embedding fonts that allows Khmer display on iPhones, 
> Nokia mobiles, browsers on Mac/PC/Linux, et cetera that were not set up for 
> Khmer. Since Khmer is one of the most complex scripts in the world…I presume 
> this opens up possibilities for many other languages.
>
> Yours in Christ,
>
> Maurice