Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Christopher V. Kimball" <mail AT cvkimball.com>]

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. א ר ץ 
(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.