Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Peter, Jim, et al.:

Personally, I'm all for writing all references in Hebrew. But (and you knew 
the but was coming) not all software is able to take the Hebrew correctly.

For example, I often use a Macintosh OS 9.0.4 which has an earlier version of 
unicode, which can correctly read consonantal Hebrew, but many of the points 
get messed up. (At least I don't have to worry about computer virii, as those 
for old Macs are no longer written.)

Today I'm borrowing a Linux computer from Gentoo distribution and the browser 
is Firefox, the first example below came out as ??? and the second doesn't 
make sense, though it is at least Hebrew.

It is my understanding that some mail programs on the servers strip out 
unicode references leaving gibberish. In those cases, it doesn't matter what 
software runs the client's computer, the Hebrew information is stripped out 
before his computer sees it. Finally, I don't know how to write Hebrew on 
this borrowed computer.

My suggestion is that we use both, the transliteration as well as the Hebrew 
until which time as all computers and servers are equipped with unicode 
complient software. When I do write Hebrew, I include a transliteration just 
in case. I would prefer to use Hebrew only, but it appears that the time has 
not yet come.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>

> 
> On 14/01/2005 18:32, Christopher V. Kimball wrote:
> 
> > The Mozilla Thunderbird mail software is available /free/ at
> >
> > http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
> >
> > It accepts Hebrew character input and pasting from the Unicode/XML Tanach.
> >
> > ???
> >
> > for example.
> 
> 
> I get question marks as well, with Mozilla which is the same under 
> the hood as Thunderbird.
> 
> Your problem is that you sent out the message with "Western 
> (ISO-8859-1)" encoding. To send Hebrew with Thunderbird, you need 
> to select either "Unicode (UTF-8)" or one of the Hebrew encodings - 
> probably from the View menu then under "Character Encodings", or 
> you can make Unicode your default as I do.
> 
> Here is some Hebrew to test that:
> 
> בְּרֵאשִׁית
> 
> This should be readable with MS Outlook and Outlook Express (recent 
> versions, but perhaps only on Windows) and several other mail 
> clients, not only with Thunderbird and Mozilla.
> 
> -- Peter Kirk
> peter AT qaya.org (personal)
> peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
> http://www.qaya.org/
-- 
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