Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 1/15/05 9:22 AM, "Jim West" <jwest AT highland.net> wrote:
> I get the text in Hebrew characters from you George.
> Can you kindly explain to me how one goes about installing unicode so
> that one can read unicode hebrew and greek?  My web browser has both
> built in (along with 2 gazillion others).
> 
> Is unicode only meant to be read on the web?  And if so, what does one
> do when one wishes to post something from a word document on a web page?

Unicode is a system-level method of encoding character info. You really
don't have to install anything except for an operating system that
understands Unicode. If you're on a PC, use Windows XP; on a Mac, upgrade to
OS 10.3. You also need Unicode-savvy software applications, e.g., your
e-mail client and your word processor and so on. For PCs, the latest
versions of Microsoft products; for Macs, it's a little more complicated,
because the latest versions of Microsoft products don't provide full Unicode
support even though the OS does. (Blech.)

The beauty of Unicode is precisely that it encodes the characters
independent of the font and application. Unicode is not just for the web but
for any document that uses text. You don't have to install any special font;
your software just has to recognize that it's dealing with Unicode
(otherwise you get ?????? or some other gibberish). So if you have a
word-processing document with Unicode text in it, you should be able to copy
from it, paste into a Unicode-savvy e-mailer or web editor, and seamlessly
make that transition.

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