Matt O'Kelly

in

Logos

2 years ago

There is a serious issue with Hebrew text in Logos, particularly in resources that switch between Hebrew and English. I suspect the issue is the change between LTR and RTL. Words get melded together making it impossible to tell where one starts and the other finishes. Sometimes words get joined together, but there’s also an extra space before a punctuation mark as the English resumes. This is if I use SBL BibLit as my chosen Hebrew font. If I change it to SBL Hebrew, this problem is apparently solved, but a new one emerges: the line spacing between the English and Hebrew texts is vastly different, meaning that lines that include Hebrew are further apart than lines without, which is horribly distracting. Whether SBL BibLit or Hebrew is selected, it seems this is always a problem in footnotes. The spacing issues are less pronounced if I switch to Ezra SIL: the words weren’t melded together, and the line spacing is less pronounced. But this is overshadowed by the fact that the Hebrew text is massive, which is equally distracting. (It also just isn’t as nice a font as SBL.) This last point — perhaps the last two points — seems to be because the Hebrew text is several points larger than the English. I am not sure why this is the case; I see no reason for it. When I copied the text into a Word document, the English text was size 11; the Hebrew, 14.5. When I pasted the text into the Word doc, the Hebrew words weren’t melded together, which suggests that this is a display issue, not a problem with the text itself. Clearly these are separate words, and Logos knows this. But it’s difficult to tell because of these formatting issues. Especially problematic is that this issue extends to introductions to Biblical Hebrew. If a student learning the language for the first time bought their textbook on Logos rather than a print copy, with issues like these they would get totally lost. I raised all this in late 2021 in a Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/Because_Matt/status/1456264330459054091). I got a response to say it had been passed on to the relevant team. I’d hoped these issues would be fixed in Logos 10, but this hasn’t turned out to be the case.