BibleWorks

What works

BibleWorks 7 on Linux, using Wine 0.9.53, is mostly happy.

What does not

Here are the problems I've had.

1) BibleWorks specifies Ariel for English text, but if you don't have Ariel installed then you get your Gnome default (which is what I wanted anyway). The font metrics however will apparently be Ariel's, and that will mess up especially the search pane. In Tools>Options>Fonts this is fixed by changing the font for the "Search Window Fonts" and "Browse Window Fonts" to whatever your default is anyway.

2) The Getting Started page formats spectacularly badly, and the links don't work. In the BibleWorks "videos" directory you can just directly load the file gs000.htm into your favorite browser and all will be well.

3) Likewise the help videos don't work, but that's no trouble; you can also load them from the videos directory into your browser directly under Gnome.

4) And finally, the help files don't work due to some problem in the HtmlHelp system. But gnome has the right viewer for them anyway, so you can just fire that up on the help files and they work fine, with one wrinkle...

5) Unicode integration is miserable. The unicode stuff is all fine strictly within BibleWorks. But if you copy to the clipboard in BibleWorks and then paste in Gnome, wine has apparently converted the text into ISO-Latin-1 characters, which is a pain if you wanted to copy some Hebrew or Greek text! (Likewise, the help files when viewed with the Gnome tool will have this problem.) This should be easily fixable, but I don't know how. Seems to me that since the Gnome clipboard is happy with Unicode text, wine should do that right.

6) And, sadly, the editor and user-notes parts of BibleWorks simply fail to work completely. This is a well-known problem. Apparently in BibleWorks 6 they worked fine, but version 7 has a brand new (better) editing system, and it doesn't work on Wine at all.

7) The main button bar doesn't show up at all. This is fairly minor since all those functions are equally accessible from the menus.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Dunno.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I didn't run it myself, I'm just channeling http://thomb.livejournal.com/184554.html