Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - [b-hebrew] Mozilla Thunderbird mail software

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Christopher V. Kimball" <mail AT cvkimball.com>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "Christopher V. Kimball" <mail AT cvkimball.com>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Mozilla Thunderbird mail software
  • Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 19:00:27 -0500


We should keep in mind that the b-hebrew list is read by amateurs (like me) for whom transliteration is an impediment. Going to a system that would include Hebrew text would make the list's expertise more widely available.

I considered writing a Hebrew-to-transliterated-text and transliterated-text-to-Hebrew converter, either as a Java application or a web site. On second thought, however, neither Java nor a Java-compatible browser would be available on the "legacy" systems that some list users have.

If you look at the system requirements for Thunderbird at

http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/sysreq.html

you see that Thunderbird will run on systems pretty far back, i.e Windows 98 on a Pentium 233 MHz processor with 64 MB RAM and 52 MB hard drive. Such a system is essentially scrap in the USA today and should be obtainable as a (tax-deductible) gift. More than 80% of users of the Unicode/XML Tanach have operating systems that meet this requirement.

Miscellaneous observations:

1. Unicode (UTF-8) encoding is critical, sending in UTF-8 encoded HTML rather than raw text is better yet. I doubt very much that mail systems mangle either of these aspects of a message.

2. High-quality Unicode biblical Hebrew fonts are available free. Even without downloading them, reasonably-modern systems display consonantal text by default.

3. With HTML messages, the Thunderbird View/"Message source" menu item gives the Unicode character equivalents, i.e. &#1488; &#1512; &#1509; (ארץ) of the Hebrew text.

4. Thunderbird rendering of biblical Hebrew text is substantially improved by placing a better usp10.dll module in the Thunderbird main directory on Windows systems. See the Unicode/XML Tanach "Installation" page for more information about this module.

5. http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/kbdheb.html gives the Windows Hebrew keyboard layout. I haven't found a way to add vowelization, yet.






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page