Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT sil.org]

Thanks to Kirk for the explanation, and of course I understand why 
there is a fee. But let me explain my frustration. The consensus on 
this list seems to be that we should use the Michigan encoding. But 
for this we need the BHS text in this encoding. Now I guess most of us 
have a printed BHS and very likely also one or more electronic forms 
incorporated in a Bible program, either commercial or (in my case) a 
special in-house one for translators; and so the royalties have 
already been paid. Now the texts used by the commercial programs have 
presumably been derived from the Michigan BHS, but the format has been 
changed to match the fonts used internally, and if there is any export 
facility it is unlikely to use the Michigan format (and why should the 
vendor add that facility - which just makes it easier for people to 
make useful illegal copies of the text?). So those of us who want to 
follow the guidelines for the list have to get (with expense and 
difficulty) a copy of the Michigan text, or else try to recreate the 
Michigan text with its non-intuitive spellings and so probably get it 
wrong. I don't know what the answer is, but unfortunately there is a 
problem.

Peter Kirk