Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 29/03/2004 19:36, Dora Smith wrote:

> Yours,
> Dora Smith
> Austin, Texas
> villandra AT austin.rr.com
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
> To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 8:05 AM
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] question about Song of the Sea
>
>
>  
>
> > This is irrelevant. There are international standards for interchange of
> > Hebrew text in e-mail, Unicode and ISO 8859-8. Text which is encoded
> > according to these standards can be displayed by any standard Hebrew
> > font, including (although not very beautifully, as George Somsel pointed
> > out re holam) Times New Roman and the other Microsoft core fonts.
> >
> >    
> >
> > >      
> > This is an error of fact. It is quite possible to send Hebrew in plain
> > text-only e-mail, as follows: בְּרֵאשִׁית - if you set the character
> >    
> coding
>  
>
> > to Unicode or ISO 8859-8. If a mail program cannot display this, it is
> > not because it is text-only but because it does not support Hebrew.
> > (Dora, this is what you failed to do in your posting which was supposed
> > to be Unicode; Outlook Express does allow you to do so.)
> >    
>
> What exactly do you mean?  WHen I clicked send it gave me some comment about
> the text and asked if I wanted to send it in unicode; I clicked to send it
> in unicode.   Is this what you mean?    Outlook Express did not then DISPLAY
> the Hebrew script as Hebrew, even though Outlook Express has access to teh
> same font.   I tried it.   But when I copied and pasted into WORD and then
> told WORD to format taht text (the gibberish) in Hebrew, it did with no
> trouble.
>
> But the post that I sent not in Unicode displayed questionmarks instead of
> gibberish for the Heberw, and when I copied, pasted and reformatted in WORD
> it displayed it as different question marks.
>
> Is there something I 'm supposed to do so that Outlook Express will display
> unicode Hebrew script in Hebrew?
>  

Dora, I am sorry for the confusion. It is now clear to me what the 
problem was. The Hebrew you were sending was not in Unicode, but in a 
non-standard encoding (possibly using Unicode private use area 
characters) which can be read only by those with the non-standard fonts 
you have. See my previous posting for more details of how to set up 
standard fonts and how to type with them. If you do this, Outlook 
Express supports Unicode Hebrew.

> > As there are plenty of free e-mail clients now available which do
> > support Hebrew, I think it is reasonable to ask those interested in
> > Hebrew to install one. After all, if one is really interested in a
> > subject one needs to acquire the basic tools for that subject.
> >    
>
> Can you please recommend some?
>
>  
Outlook Express is a good start. Or try Mozilla.




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