[b-hebrew] Mozilla Thunderbird mail software
Christopher V. Kimball
mail at cvkimball.com
Sat Jan 15 19:00:27 EST 2005
We should keep in mind that the b-hebrew list is read by amateurs (like
me) for whom transliteration is an impediment. Going to a system that
would include Hebrew text would make the list's expertise more widely
available.
I considered writing a Hebrew-to-transliterated-text and
transliterated-text-to-Hebrew converter, either as a Java application or
a web site. On second thought, however, neither Java nor a
Java-compatible browser would be available on the "legacy" systems that
some list users have.
If you look at the system requirements for Thunderbird at
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/sysreq.html
you see that Thunderbird will run on systems pretty far back, i.e
Windows 98 on a Pentium 233 MHz processor with 64 MB RAM and 52 MB hard
drive. Such a system is essentially scrap in the USA today and should be
obtainable as a (tax-deductible) gift. More than 80% of users of the
Unicode/XML Tanach have operating systems that meet this requirement.
Miscellaneous observations:
1. Unicode (UTF-8) encoding is critical, sending in UTF-8 encoded HTML
rather than raw text is better yet. I doubt very much that mail systems
mangle either of these aspects of a message.
2. High-quality Unicode biblical Hebrew fonts are available free. Even
without downloading them, reasonably-modern systems display consonantal
text by default.
3. With HTML messages, the Thunderbird View/"Message source" menu item
gives the Unicode character equivalents, i.e. א ר ץ
(ארץ) of the Hebrew text.
4. Thunderbird rendering of biblical Hebrew text is substantially
improved by placing a better usp10.dll module in the Thunderbird main
directory on Windows systems. See the Unicode/XML Tanach "Installation"
page for more information about this module.
5. http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdheb.html gives the
Windows Hebrew keyboard layout. I haven't found a way to add
vowelization, yet.
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