Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 22/01/2004 10:31, Lance Petersen wrote:

> ...
>
> One of the limitations of the software is fatal. It uses ASCII text and left 
> to right reading order. Every line in the Hebrew text has a carriage return 
> that I've put in. If I change screen resolution or simply change the window 
> size, the text suddenly looks like something found in a diaper. I'm limited 
> to a single font, and nobody can view it without that font. (Yeah, I know, 
> I'm the only one that was supposed to see it.) I could go on forever. These 
> were all things Peter Kirk brought up in his side of the discussion. I am all 
> for Peter and his buddies creating fixes for these kinds of problems. I'm 
> also all for people letting the developers know what their needs and 
> objections are. The Unicoders (for lack of a better term) and other 
> developers are far more apt to listen to some members of this list because of 
> their credentials than they are to someone like me. That's why I thought the 
> discussion was vital. Let those problems get hammered out now. That way, I , 
> or someone li
> ke me,
> won't see years worth of work on a pet project go up in flames because of a 
> software oversight.
>
>  
This issue is technically independent of Unicode, but in practice 
closely linked to it. Most computers, because they were designed in the 
west, by default display characters starting at the top left and then 
across the screen in lines which then move down the page, although this 
is only one of several schemes used in the world.

Schemes for displaying Hebrew which do not go into the depths of the 
system software are forced to use this left-to-right default setup. They 
get round the problem by storing Hebrew text reversed, in so-called 
visual order. This makes it very hard to edit, but the main problem is 
with line wrapping; it is necessary to code in hard line breaks, and if 
the lines are wider than the window the text gets into the state which 
you so graphically described. It is not an "oversight" but a deliberate 
design choice that your package works like this. Packages like TeX 
include functions to reverse the text order so that it is displayed 
correctly, but only in a predefined page width.

The only alternative to this is to use a system which has been specially 
developed or modified to support proper right-to-left display. In fact 
current versions of Windows, MacOS and Linux have been modified 
successfully, originally for the Middle East market but now for the 
world market. This means that Hebrew (and Arabic, Syriac etc) text 
stored in logical order, i.e. with the first letter of the Hebrew word 
first, can be displayed properly. But this works correctly only if the 
Hebrew text is encoded in the way that the system expects it to be 
encoded. And, although in principle many encodings could be used (though 
they would have to be ones in which Hebrew is distinguished from Latin 
at the code point level and not in higher level markup e.g. choice of 
font), in practice the only supported encoding for pointed Hebrew is, 
surprise surprise, Unicode.

If you don't like Unicode, you can always rewrite the Linux kernel to 
support logical order Hebrew with your own preferred encoding. But it is 
a lot less effort to use Unicode!

As for your specific setup, it will continue to work, but it won't get 
any better as the company is defunct. You might like to look at the 
packages from http://www.logos.com/; their Hebrew text is Unicode-based 
and so should not have the word wrap problem. But I don't know if it can 
do the other things which your current package does.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/