Biblical Hebrew Forum

["John Richards" <jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk>]

For those who wish to convert the OTA BHS text to Hebrew format for
themselves, and who want to get as perfect a final text as possible, there
is a way round the missing line breaks in the OTA copy, which otherwise
cause corruption at the stage when the text is processed to read right to
left, since the CC R2L file cannot cope with a long wrapping line properly.

All one has to do is run through the text in a word processor immediately
before the final stage of the conversion - ie. before the R2L stage - and
break lines that wrap. It is easiest to do this if the display is set to
show Paragraph marks. This process does not take as long as one might
expect, and is well worth the trouble. Then, with the text saved again in
ASCII format, the final R2L process can be run. If it indicates errors while
running the process -"More than 250" (or some such wording) - it means you
have missed some long lines.

I do wish there was someone with influence on the holders of the Oxford Text
Archive who could prevail on them to see that a CORRECT version of the BHS
was on their site - and also that the option to download a zipped copy was
reintroduced as well. Having to download a simple ASCII file into the
browser and then save it is asking for problems unnecessarily. Otherwise,
why don't CCAT make their copy of the BHS more openly available? After all,
it is surely in no one's interest to have faulty versions of the BHS
floating around the scholarly world. Or is it? Since a copy IS available, it
would be sensible for it to be a correct one.

John Richards