Step 1: Install wine-staging
You'll need to use Wine to run theWord on Linux. Depending on your distro, there may be as many as five different ways to install Wine. All of them will work to varying degrees, but you'll likely have the best experience using the latest version of Wine Staging directly from WineHQ. When using Wine Development or Wine Stable, you may notice some text missing in the Preferences dialog of theWord. Wine Staging fixes this problem.
How to install Wine Staging will depend on your distro. Official instructions can be found at https://wiki.winehq.org/Download. If your distro isn't listed on their website, try searching for a wine-staging package in your distro's package manager.
If your distro doesn't have wine-staging available, and you're an experienced Linux user, you may be able to download the Wine source code, add on the staging patches, and then build Wine from source. However, this is a daunting task, especially since you'll probably need to do a WoW64 build of Wine in order to run theWord when you're done (as theWord is a 32-bit application and most computers are 64-bit). If you aren't experienced enough to build Wine from source and don't have wine-staging in your distro's repositories, I'd recommend switching your OS to the latest stable version of Debian (currently Debian 12).
Step 2: Install theWord using compact mode + USB flash drive mode
If you install theWord normally, in non-compact mode, it will work just fine, but if you have to tweak anything inside the guts of theWord, you'll end up having to dig through weird directories and will possibly have to make changes in multiple locations to get things working the way you want. Installing theWord in USB flash drive mode will keep all theWord files in one convenient little bundle that's easy to manage. Contrary to its name, USB flash drive mode does not require a USB flash drive to use - you can use it to install theWord into any blank folder on your computer.
To do a USB flash drive installation of theWord:
- Download your desired theWord package from https://theword.net/.
- Launch the installer you just downloaded.
- If an archive manager application appears when you try to launch theWord's installer, that's probably because Wine isn't set as the default application to open .exe files. In this instance, you should be able to right-click the installer, click "Open With...", choose "Wine Windows Program Loader", enable "Always use for this file type", and then click "Open" to get theWord's installer to launch. The steps to do this may vary a bit depending on your distro and desktop environment - the above steps are based on Debian 12 with GNOME.
- Click "Next", then accept theWord's license agreement.
- On the "installation type" screen, click "Compact (Single folder)", and then check the "USB flash drive mode" box. Then click "Next".
- If you don't want to install all of the default resources, browse through the resource list and uncheck anything you don't want. I would highly recommend keeping Mickelson's Enhanced Strong's Greek and Hebrew Dictionaries, though, as you won't get Strong's number popups without it. Once you're done choosing components, click "Next".
- On the "Choose Install Location" screen, click "Browse...". You can then navigate through your system's folders and decide where you want to install theWord. You probably want to install it somewhere inside your home directory, as you won't be able to install theWord in a location that your user account doesn't have write permissions for. Make a new folder wherever you intend to install theWord, then install theWord into that new folder. (Otherwise you may end up with theWord files cluttering up other data!)
- twFlashDriveInstall.png (26.64 KiB) Viewed 3248 times
- Ensure that the install path looks something like "Z:\home\user\theWord". The "Z:\" part is normal and is how Wine maps Linux file paths to something that looks familiar to Windows programs. Make sure that the folder at the end of the install path is the new folder you made a bit ago. If everything looks right, click "Install".
- Uncheck "Run theWord" and then click "Finish". You can run theWord right now if you want, but the experience will be less-than-ideal if you do that right now.
The default font theWord uses on Wine is Tahoma. Tahoma is actually a fairly nice font on Windows, but the Tahoma-like font Wine provides is awful and will cause theWord's user interface to behave in strange ways. Thankfully, theWord has a setting that allows you to change the font used to render theWord's user interface. One font that works relatively well is DejaVu Sans. It's not perfect, but it's close, and it will provide a much better experience than Tahoma.
Some of the bugs you'll avoid by switching away from the Tahoma font include:
- Strange extra spacing in the middle of Bible text
- Text cursor "travel" when typing in the Bible search view
- General program ugliness (Wine's Tahoma font is very low-quality)
- Open the folder you installed theWord into. If you did a USB flash drive installation, you should already know where to go.
- If you didn't do a USB flash drive installation, you'll probably find theWord under "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files(x86)/The Word".
- Open the "english.lng" file.
- At the end of the [_main_] section, you'll see a line that looks like this:
Uncomment it by removing the "#" at the beginning and change the font name to your desired font, like this:
Code: Select all
#font=ConsolasMake sure that the font you're using is actually installed. DejaVu Sans is installed by default on Debian 12 with GNOME, but it may not be installed on your system. You can install it and a bunch of other DejaVu fonts on Debian by running:Code: Select all
font=DejaVu SansCode: Select all
sudo apt install fonts-dejavu - Save the english.lng file and close it.
- Finally, launch theword.exe. If everything went well, you should be greeted by a rather nice-looking program (rather than the somewhat gnarly version you'd get if you stuck with the bad Tahoma font).
- theWordDejaVuSans.png (154.09 KiB) Viewed 3248 times
Our battle against Tahoma isn't quite done yet - if you open any book modules, you'll be greeted by ugly, possibly glitchy, and likely improperly formatted text. We need to change the default Book View font to something else (preferably DejaVu Sans).
- Click File > Preferences...
- Click on the Fonts tab.
- Click on the drop-down menu for "Default book view font".
- Can't see any text above the drop-down menus? You probably installed wine-stable or wine-devel earlier. The default book view drop-down menu is at the very bottom, and should say "Tahoma" to begin with.
- Find a font you like (I highly recommend DejaVu Sans), and select it.
- Click "OK" to apply the new font.
- You may have to click a new topic in each Book View and then click back onto the topic you were on before in order to get the font change to work.
Step 5: Dealing with weird boxes
Every so often, you may encounter improperly rendered text in theWord. Usually you'll see odd boxes or rectangles in place of the text you'd expect to see. This problem is most easily visible on some of the introductory pages of the M-Strong module (though thankfully the actual dictionary pages appear to be unaffected). This problem can be due to a number of different things (missing glyphs in a font, text encoding anomalies, etc.), but most of the time there's an easy solution. Copy and paste the mis-rendered text into a text editor. If you want to see the original formatting of the text, LibreOffice Writer generally works for this (though it may not work perfectly all the time). If you don't care for formatting or if LibreOffice isn't displaying the text properly, a plain-text editor should work. Most distros should come with a plain-text editor pre-installed, and many distros have LibreOffice installed already.
If you encounter strange boxes in a user-editable module, you can fix them by copying the offending text, pasting it into LibreOffice Writer or a text editor, then copying the correctly rendered text back into theWord. (Make sure to double-check that the text actually looks right before copying it back into theWord!) If the module you're dealing with isn't user-editable (which will usually be the case), you can just copy text into LibreOffice Writer or a text editor to view it and then close the document without saving it when you're done. (Note that closing without saving is very important, as it may not be legal to save copies of text that you've copied out of certain theWord modules!)
Note that it is possible to make some non-user-editable modules into user-editable modules, but this is beyond the scope of this guide, it's not always possible, and doing this sort of thing will let you damage your modules. I therefore do not recommend trying that.
I hope you found this guide helpful! Enjoy using theWord!
