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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Reading hebrew characters on your computer without hebrew fonts installed on your computer

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  • From: Trevor Peterson <06peterson AT cua.edu>
  • To: phil-eng AT ighmail.com
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Reading hebrew characters on your computer without hebrew fonts installed on your computer
  • Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 05:37:57 -0500

Philip Engmann wrote:
Dear b-hebraists,

Hebrew characters are not allowed on this list because the Hebrew
characters usually cannot be read by others on this list who do not have
the same hebrew fonts on their computers that the writer has.

There is a way to read Hebrew characters on one's computer even if one
does not have the Hebrew font's that the writer used.

Is this worth considering?

It is, and it has been considered in the past, and it has been judged not to be universal enough to implement for the list just yet. If you search the list archives for "Unicode," I'm sure you'll find previous discussions about this very issue. Personally, I do think it is widespread enough to begin using it in tandem with transliteration. This is, in fact, what I do on the Aramaic list. Part of the problem, though, is even if many newer computers come equipped to handle Unicode, whether the user knows what it is or not, there are still a lot of people using older systems, and some of the intermediate resources still need to be upgraded. (For instance, Yahoo Groups will transmit e-mail containing Unicode well enough, but the Web interface does not display them properly. So anyone viewing messages on the Web site will not be able to read whatever is written in Unicode.) For these reasons, it has not superseded transliteration.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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