What is New =========== 3.99.02 (Unicode) Nov. 19, 2009 =============================== 1) Misc bugs fixed. 2) Support for Hebrew texts added. 3) Pocket PC allows data to be stored on a device named "Storage Card". We still have to add support for copying from right to left texts. 4.00 (Unicode) ============== READ CAREFULLY--ALL OF IT! 1) Unicode supported throughout the program. XP or later is now required to run the program. It will no longer work under the Windows 9X operating system. There have been massive internal changes to the program to make this work.(e.g. 25-30K of code changes!) This means that Bibles which required special fonts and the Fonts.Map file to work correctly will have to be converted to Unicode. The Fonts.Map file is obsolete. OLBGrk and OLBHeb fonts are no longer used.Courier New font automatically replaces Courier font whenever it is used. Courier looks dreadful under Unicode. 2) Compile tools process Unicode modules correctly. We processed and accessed correctly the Ethiopian Amharic Bible which is fully Unicode. Any module containing characters greater than #127 will result in a Unicode format module which cannot be read by the non-Unicode version of the Online Bible. 3) Compile tools are now memory based and cache most things in memory when compiling. They were originally created to run on an 8 mhz /286 with 640K of ram and used disk space. We estimate that to compile a 5 meg text module you will need 25 megs of ram. The tools run much faster than before. What took 3 to four minutes now takes about one minute! Originally, it took three and a half hours on a /286 to compile the AV Bible in 1987! It now takes about a minute. 4) Full support for WINE which means the program will run on Mac and Linux with WINE. WINE version is restricted to the starter pack modules. It requires an unlock fee like the Pocket PC to access all modules. We would like to recover some of our development expenses. The existing Windows Unicode version runs under WINE. Testing was done on the free version of Wine version 1.1.28 (http://www.winehq.org) and Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (April 2009) On the MAC, Codeweaver's WINE was used. We have not extensively tested other versions of Linux with WINE and have had reports of it not working on some versions of Linux. The audio portion of the Online Bible is not supported under WINE. The registry fonts settings under WINE are changed at setup to improve the visual appearance of the display font. The initial desktop is loaded twice to eliminate the spurious scroll bars Wine creates on the main form. This is a Wine problem which will likely never be fixed by the developers of Wine. 5) Program is at least two to three times faster than before, even with full Unicode support. 6) Program development done under Delphi 2009 (by CodeGear) and uses enhanced GUI features on Vista and later systems. Under XP the appearance of the GUI has not changed much from previous versions. Some of the GUI enhancements are: a) Slider bar on Reference window b) Selected tab is highlighted (either as blue or white) on Vista c) Multi-line hints Under Vista the GUI interface is much more elegant. 7) New text box to replace the TRichEdit box we have used since 1996. This added almost 6K of new code plus changed lots of existed code. Some shortcut keys have changed to allow cursor movements to be more friendly for JAWS, WindowEyes and other screen readers. Major cursor key changes are: a) Up, Down, Left and Right arrow keys move the cursor only. No Sync scrolling is performed. b) Control Key + Left or Right keys moves you to the previous or next word. This is standard behaviour for all word processors. c) Control Key + Down or Up keys moves you to the previous or next item and Sync scrolling is performed if selected. d) Control Key + Enter does a floating window look up on the item where the cursor is placed. This takes place even if the floating windows option is disabled. Pressing Enter on a verse number in a passage window either displays the note for that verse or invokes the editor so you can add a note to that verse. e) Control Key + Home moves to first line in a note or the first verse in a search or cross reference list f) Control Key + End moves to last line in a note or the last verse in a search or cross reference list g) Escape Key closes a floating window or a right mouse button popup menu. h) Shift + arrow keys select text. Note the implementation differs slightly from standard text boxes - Shift + Right, Shift + Left selects a whole word not just one character at a time. This varies from the standard implementation but is very handy. - Shift + Home Selects to the beginning of the line. - Shift + End Selects to the end of the line. - Shift Page Up or Shift Page Down, selection is not supported. - Control + A selects all the text displayed in the window. Existing selection if any is cleared. - Shift + Control + Home selects the text in displayed in the window from the first word in the window to the cursor location. Existing selection if any is cleared. - Shift + Control + End selects the text in displayed in the window from cursor to the last word displayed in the window. Existing selection if any is cleared. In a Passage, Search or Cross Reference window. - H selects the current verse with no formatting. - L selects the current verse with RTF formatting preserved. i) Shift + F10 brings up the right mouse button popup menu in a main window or in a floating window. These cursor key changes allow the program to be run without a mouse. The following special Windows edit messages are implemented to allow JAWS easier access to this control: EM_CHARFROMPOS, EM_GETCHARFORMAT, EM_GETLINE, EM_GETPARAFORMAT, EM_GETSEL, EM_LINEFROMCHAR, EM_LINEINDEX, EM_LINELENGTH, EM_POSFROMCHAR, EM_SCROLLCARET, EM_SETSEL, WM_GETTEXT, WM_GETTEXTLENGTH The JAWS Control File for "Olb" was changed to facilitate this feature from Jaws The new text box has been a major internal change that affects just about every display window. Previously we had to second guess what was going on in the TRichEdit control, now we know and the control itself can tell us when its needs reloading as well as many other things. 8) Scroll Bar works differently with the new text box. It only reflects what was actually loaded into the textbox. On a passage window, it no longer maps into the whole Bible but only to the verses that are loaded. If you scroll to the end, to see more click on the down arrow on the scroll bar. The same holds true for the search and cross reference window. If the results are too large to be held entirely in the box, click on the down arrow on the scroll bar to see more, just like you now do in the passage window. 9) Sync Scrolling works differently. It is only activated when you load a note or a version or when you move through the text box with the arrow keys and the control key depressed. Otherwise you can roam around the box with the arrow keys and not cause sync scrolling to occur. 10) Pocket PC updated to handle the new Unicode module format and eliminates OLBHeb.TTF. You may have to reset you Pocket PC to delete this legacy font from your fonts directory. We have replaced it with an old Times New Roman font that contains most of the Unicode characters and displays Hebrew well. To delete OlbHeb.TTF use File Explorer on the Pocket PC to locate the font under the Windows\Fonts directory. Press the stylus on the name to get a popup menu. Rename the font to "x.x" and then delete it. 11) The program requires a version 3.00 of the non-Unicode version to be installed before you can upgrade to this new version. Much of the legacy upgrade code for obsolete modules has been deleted from the Unicode version. 12) PNG images files are now supported. 13) Editor works with full Unicode but allows old ASCII characters to define Unicode characters. ... -> Unicode Ditto = #8230; ` -> Unicode Opening Single Quote = #8216; ' -> Unicode Closing Single Quote = #8217; `` -> Unicode Opening Double Quote = #8220; '' -> Unicode Closing Double Quote = #8221; -- -> Unicode Long Dash = #8212; << -> Unicode Opening French Double Quote = #171; >> -> Unicode Closing French Double Quote = #187; When you format a paragraph containing these characters or load in a file that does not have the ".txt" extension, they are automatically converted to their Unicode equivalents. For now the Greek and Hebrew characters are not mapped into Unicode but you can enter Greek and Hebrew Unicode including all the accents and vowel points. There is a strange quirk in writing Hebrew words. The Windows TextOut function automatically reverses the character string. Since we were manually reversing it too, this made for some strange output until we realised what was happening. Note that the ASCII dash - #45, and the double quote " #34 are not mapped. The Unicode dash #8211 is mapped into the ASCII dash otherwise the RTF encoding breaks. All characters greater the #127 are considered to be Unicode, and if a file contains Unicode characters, the editor saves it in Unicode format which is incompatible with non-Unicode version of Online Bible. Unicode text files contain the three byte header $EF $BB $BF to identify a UTF8 format Unicode text file. 14) Only fonts with a suffix of ".TTF" are recognised. These are copied to the Windows Fonts directory and are not deleted by an uninstall. Previously they were copied to a private directory and a registry entry made informing windows of their location. You still have to reboot the computer if new fonts are added. Adding new fonts should now be a very rare occurrence unlike with the non-Unicode version. Only a handful special Unicode Bible modules require special fonts like the Ethiopian Amharic Bibles or the Chinese Bible. 15) The single click hyperlink lookup only works on highlighted text. Otherwise double click to look up a word. 16) Floating window support completely rewritten and works much more reliably than before. 17) For Installers, the Install.Msg file may be subdivided in one or more language groupings to facilitate converting various languages to Unicode. For example we split Russian and Ukrainian messages into a file called Install.Rus and converted it to UTF8. The Win32 directory on the DVD contains both an Install.Msg and an Install.Rus. The Install.Msg file is always loaded last and so that the other Install message files override any duplication of language messages in Install.Msg. 18) The Client/Server supports two new command. a) The command ShowPassage takes an argument for the command is the passage reference. This passage is displayed and all other windows are synced accordingly. If the main window is minimized, it is set to the normal size and all minimized child windows are set to their normal size. b) The command GetPassage returns a string for the passage displayed in the passage window. The value returned is for the first open passage that is found. 19) During startup, the user is given the option of cleaning out the hidden Application Temp (Locals\AppTemp\ on Vista) directory if we find more than 25 files in it. I was surprised to find I had over 500 files or folders in mine containing over 500 megs of data. For some reason Disk Cleanup does not clean up this directory. If you are experiencing slow installations and startups, this is likely the reason. Deleted files are moved to the recycle bin. This seems to be a slow process. 20) Tile Classic now puts the program back the way it used to be. The Resource menu is turned off, and double clicks are required to activate links. The windows tool bar remains. This happens whenever you select this configuration from the Windows menu style list. The old style Library and Favourites forms are used instead of the Resource Panel on the left. On the Tile Default the order of the windows at the top is changed to make it more compatible with the previous way of displaying windows. The search results are displayed on the left side and the passage window is displayed on the right side. 21) Hebrew support for pointed text added. Four new modules exhibit this. BHc - Biblical Hebrew, Consonantal Text BHcm - Biblical Hebrew, Morphological Consonantal Text BHvpm - Biblical Hebrew, Morphological with vowel points BHvp - Biblical Hebrew, with vowel points These replace the obsolete BHS and BHM modules. Following transliterations codes added to the Hebrew to display the vowel points and other Hebrew accents. Name Code Unicode Qamats A 1464 Patah B 1463 Hiriq C 1460 Tsere D 1461 Segol E 1462 Dagesh F 1468 Qubuts G 1467 Holem Haser H 1465 Sheva W 1456 Hataf Segol X 1457 Hataf Patah Y 1458 Hataf Qamats Z 1459 Since you write Hebrew in your notes as right to left, these values always come after a consonant, which means you write them to the left of the consonant so they appear to come after the consonant when reading right to left. \^Aa\^ not \^aA\^ You can directly enter Hebrew unicode values into your notes, but the Windows controls do strange things with them. Hence we recommend that yuo use transliterations for your notes. These display properly when you float your mouse cursor over them. Pocket PC does not display accents and vowel points correctly on Greek and Hebrew modules. 22) New option on compile menu, "Create Demo Module." This creates a demo module that is about 5% of the size of the real module. 23) New option on Create User Material, "Use Module Font." This forces the program to always use the specified font for this module. Some unicode modules require special unicode fonts to display properly. The Hebrew and Greek modules require Time New Roman and require this option. Conclusion ========== About a two dozen Bibles will need to be converted to Unicode and this will be done after the Unicode version is released, later in the fall. See the list below. WARNING: Once you start to create Unicode files, (which is very easy to do!) you cannot revert back to the non-Unicode Online Bible. Version 3.00 detects files with Unicode headers, and reads them trashing Unicode characters. It will not let you replace a file with a Unicode header. Earlier versions the 3.00 would trash Unicode files creating a real mess. Compatibility ============= The new Unicode version will run all existing modules except those which contain a Fonts.map file. Only about a couple dozen Bible modules are affected like Arabic, Chinese, Russian and so forth which do not use 100% Roman characters. These will be converted to Unicode in the next month or so. New modules compiled with the Unicode version will not run on the old non-Unicode version. We will be posting new modules compiled with the new version. The old modules will be moved to a different location for download for those who still require that format. Those requiring the old modules will either have to purchase a CD with them on or download them. For the next year or so we will still have a CD available for those running the old version under Windows 9X. These old modules will not longer be updated. Only those running Windows 9X, will require the old non-Unicode Online Bible. We are trying to make the transition to pure Unicode as painless as possible. Know problems ============= 1) Under Wine. 1a) Help system does not work under WINE sometimes. We are not waiting to fix this before we release this version and are looking at alterative help systems for use with WINE. 1b) Fonts that use character overlays to display accents do not display properly under WINE. For example in the Hebrew text with vowel points, the vowel points are displayed after the consonants as separate letters and not overlayed over the letters. 2) The foreign Bibles that require special fonts will not work until they are converted to Unicode. This should be done by the end of the year and will only be available on the new version 4.00 DVD. We do not plan to post these for download since not too many people will require them. Existing Greek and Hebrew Bibles that display in Unicode will not search correctly until they are pure Unicode. See the list below. 3) Hebrew text copied incorrectly on the clipboard. The letters are reversed. This is on the list of things to fix. 4) Pocket PC does not display accents and vowel points correctly on Greek and Hebrew modules. Bibles To Be Converted To Unicode ================================= 1) Ketchi 2) CORNLCU 3) GDANSK 4) KAROLI 5) KRALICKA 6)* RST 7)* UKRAINE 8) KitabiMukaddes 9) KutsalKitap 10)* MGREEKM 11)* MGreekU 12) ARABIC 13) GNPU 14) TKV 15)* VIET 16) Yoba 17)* BHS (Replaced by BHc, BHvp) 18)* BHM (Replaced by BHcm, BHvpm) 19)* TR 20)* BYZ 21)* WH 22) IGNT 23) InterLin 24)* Amharic62 25)* Amharic87 26)* Maori 27) Simplified Chinese Obsolete DOS Ascii Modules 28)* c:\User\Zy_DVD\Olb\Bible\Brink (Dutch) 29)* c:\User\Zy_DVD\Olb\Bible\NAS 30)* c:\User\Zy_DVD\Olb\BibleSpa\NRV 31)* c:\User\Zy_DVD\Olb\BibleTbl\SANGO 32)* c:\User\Zy_DVD\Olb\BibleTbl\SHUAR Ones marked with an * are updated on the 4.00 DVD.