Conversational Theology

I know you’ve all been anxiously awaiting the outcome of the Nota Bene Hebrew printing problem (Okay, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the outcome of the NB Hebrew printing problem!). Anyway, nice Steve from technical support emailed me this morning with a patch which solves the problem. Hooray!!! No thanks to the nasty people at MS Vista who made life so unnecessarily complicated.

Thanks to everyone who’s made helpful suggestions re. my font problems. I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to Steve from Nota Bene and we’ve identified that this is, actually, a font problem! Which is to say, not the fault of the printer, nor of Nota Bene (happens in Word too, if you cut and paste from NB). For those who are interested, what’s happening is that the Windows Character Map is displaying all the non-printing characters (in every font, including things like the SBL Hebrew font) as printing characters. Steve has now gone off to see if he can find a solution.

ETA: Steve just called back to let me know that they’ve found the source of the problem – in a recent update to Vista which has changed some of the settings.  All the computers at NB technical support now have the same problem!  So at least they know what they’re working with now and they’ll let me know when they’ve found a solution.

For my academic work I use a software programme called Nota Bene which combines a bibliographic database, text searching facility and an academically-oriented word-processing package. It’s great. One of its big advantages is its system for entering non-English text. Hebrew accents, vowels and other diacritical marks can be entered easily and precisely.

When I switched to my new computer, with its Vista operating system, everything seemed to be fine. There were a few teething problems getting the right settings for displaying the Hebrew and so on. Then I tried printing it out and disaster struck! All the vowels/accents etc. are printed with a spacing marker (a dotted circle) and aligned incorrectly. It’s a mess.

I’ve tried the NB technical support who suggest that I try to change the printer settings. Something about the unicode character set that’s used to space the vowel points being incorrectly mapped to a font in the printer. I can’t find anything in the printer preferences or options that would relate to this at all. I did try printing it to a pdf converter to see if that would help, but I get exactly the same problem.

So you’re my last resort!

ETA:  I seem to have found at least a way round the problem. If I use one of NB’s own fonts, rather than say, Times New Roman, the Hebrew seems to print normally. Weird.