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

[Maurice Bauhahn]

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