I became aware of this some time ago, but decided, since it is a small issue, not to write anything about it until the rush to get the Mac version out the door was passed. There remain a number of minor display issues related to presentation of Hebrew text. As an example I have inserted a screen shot below that shows four different Hebrew texts as displayed in Logos 4 for the Mac.
Notice that in the first of these (left-most, going English-fashion instead of Hebrew-fashion), the BHS SESB text has significant display problems. Not only is the text crammed together at numerous points, but there is a non-printing character of some sort that shows us as a dotted circle at the beginning of each verse. At first I thought this was connected to the display of the dagesh, but it also shows up in vv. 18 and 19 (not shown), where there is no dagesh. Also, both the run-together text and the dotted circle remain no matter how big the panel is, and also when it is floated as a separate window that is expanded to fill the full screen.
While the SESB is the most problematic text in this regard, other Hebrew texts have similar, if lesser, problems. Minor problems with the spacing and layout of the text crop up from time to time. Note this in v. 7 of all three of the other texts (AFAT, W4, and WIVU), and in the heading of the third (W4). Also v. 2 has problems in each of the texts, though not the same problems (tohu wabohu is run together in the first line of W4 ann WIVU but not in AFAT, though all of them run together ruachelohim in line 2 of the verse).
I cannot tell whether these are encoding errors in the texts themselves or display quirks in the program. Presumably the numerous problems with SESB have something to do with the way the text is encoded. In any case, I thought that I should report these so that the development team could take at look at them and try to figure out what causes them.
By the way, in a related issue, I have noted that problems sometimes arise in copying the text and pasting it into an Unicode-compliant application such as Mellel, and that these problems differ from text to text. In this regard, the SESB text has the most problems and the others less. But I have not yet been able to determine a pattern to these quirks. Presumably this, at least, does have something to do with the way that the various texts are encoded.
– DLA
