Biblical Hebrew Forum

[DJNordlund AT aol.com]

In a message dated 1/14/2005 1:41:08 PM Pacific Standard Time,  
jwest AT highland.net writes:



Trevor Peterson wrote:

> Are the scholars press fonts  Unicode now? Haven't they been around 
> forever? But if the point of  using Thunderbird is to send Unicode, not 
> only would you not want to  use a legacy font, but there's no reason to 
> mandate Thunderbird.  Outlook, for instance, should work just fine if 
> properly  configured.
>
> Trevor



Jim West responded:  

Not that I know of.  Yes, they have been around forever.   But even if one 
has unicode, one must have the correct unicode font installed  in order to be 
able to read foreign characters.

<snip>

Best

Jim
 
------My  Reply------


No,  when using unicode fonts it is not necessary to have "the  correct" font 
installed.  That is the benefit of unicode.  All you  need is some unicode 
font that supports the language you are interested  in.  Unicode fonts like 
MS 
Arial Unicode, and Palatino Linotype support  (at least) English, polytonic 
Greek, and Hebrew.  Those fonts can  appropriately render Hebrew or Greek 
text 
that is written using those fonts,  or any other unicode fonts, such as SIL 
EZRA 
unicode or Cyberbit Basic, etc.,  as long as UTF-8 encoding is used to send 
the text (as pointed out by Peter  Kirk).
 
The major problem seems to be with email clients.  I use both MS  Outlook and 
AOL email clients.  Outlook works just fine for sending and  receiving email 
with unicode.  On the other hand, while I can often read  unicode/UTF-8 
encoded email with AOL, I cannot currently send unicode/UTF-8  email 
correctly 
(AFAIK).
 
Dan Nordlund
Bothell, WA  USA