Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Heard, Christopher" <Christopher.Heard AT pepperdine.edu>]

On 12/29/04 9:39 AM, "Charles Rempel" <CharlesR AT mygalaxyexpress.com> wrote:
> With Hebrew as a downloadable font in Windows, I would think that it is not
> the email client who controls the option. Of course there is the MAC
> enviroment which might struggle :-) but then I have always heard of the
> superiority of MAC's

It's not really a matter of font availability, but of the capabilities of
the software used to read the messages. Both Windows and Macintosh have
plenty of Unicode fonts available; in Mac OS X, they're build into the OS
(no need to download or install anything special). But it _is_ in fact the
e-mail client software that controls whether those characters can be
displayed for the end user. It's the e-mail reader software that determines
whether Unicode characters are displayed properly, can be typed, etc. And
since not all e-mail readers are Unicode-savvy, it's not "safe" to assume
that everybody can read them.

For example, if you send me an e-mail message with Hebrew Unicode in it, my
Microsoft Entourage 2004 for Mac can display it just fine, but typing in
Unicode Hebrew in a Microsoft for Mac product is a major pain (Microsoft
thinks it knows better than the typist what order the letters should go in).
If I were to use the web interface to my e-mail, say from a Kinko's or
somewhere away from my own computer, your Unicode Hebrew might show up as
gobbledygook in MS Internet Explorer for Mac, but Safari for Mac would
display it just fine. So it really is dependent on the software being used
to read the code, not on the font encoding or the OS.

Chris


-- 
R. Christopher Heard
Assistant Professor of Religion
Armstrong Fellow in Religion
Pepperdine University
http://faculty.pepperdine.edu/cheard
http://www.iTanakh.org
http://www.semioticsandexegesis.info