Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Trevor:

I admit that I don’t know everything that’s going on with SBL fonts and 
unicode, but these are the patterns that I notice:

1) When George emailed me directly with the SBL font, what I read was Hebrew 
with some points misplaced, but it was easy to recognize where those points 
belong so there was no problem reading the message. But when he CCed the 
message through B-Hebrew, all the Hebrew changed to question marks. In other 
words, there is something going on that is different between a direct message 
and one going through B-Hebrew.

2) When I access a site encoded using the SBL font, points are misplaced. If 
I try using the SBL font, all the points are misplaced, making it somewhat 
difficult to read.

3) If I access a site encoded in unicode, but not the SBL font, at least one 
of my browsers (Safari) renders all points correctly (as far as I have 
checked), even cantilation points.

4) If I download a .pdf or other file encoded in unicode, the points render 
correctly. None of those that I have downloaded used SBL fonts.

>From the above pattern, there is something going on that whereever the SBL 
>fonts are used to write and/or read a file, it does not render correctly. 
>Where the SBL fonts are not present, I have few (Camino browser) to no 
>problems with rendering Hebrew. Now I may be missing something, but it 
>certainly looks as if the SBL fonts are the problem. Do you see how I came 
>to this conclusion?

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Trevor Peterson" <abuian AT access4less.net>
> 
> ----- Original Message Follows -----
> From: "Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>
> 
> > It looks as if the fault lies with the SBL font.
> >
> > 1) Apparently the SBL font is only partially unicode
> > complient in the first place, which means that its use
> > should be discouraged for scholarly discourse.
> 
> I rather doubt that this is the problem.
> 
> > I have yet
> > to see a SBL encoded site that has the points in the right
> > places, while unicode encoded sites render well.
> 
> I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. Encoding
> and font are two different issues. Let me give you a
> relevant example. When I write a Web page, I compose
> everything in plain text. This means that the characters are
> entered irrespective of the font that will ultimately be
> used to display the text in the finished Web page. They're
> rather ugly, because my text editor (Windows Notepad) can
> only use one font at a time, and the font on my system that
> displays the widest range of characters is Titus. But I can
> see that everything is there, at least. I use markup to tell
> the browser which font I think it ought to use to display
> Hebrew (a few ranked options), and a backup generic font
> type, in case the user doesn't have anything I've suggested.
> Now, it happens that I usually recommend SBL Hebrew as the
> first choice, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the
> encoding used in the HTML source.
> >
> > 2) the pattern of question marks in George’s
> messages
> > indicate that his mail server can send and receive unicode
> > within plain text messages, but those messages that go
> > through the B-Hebrew server have the non-unicode complient
> > SBL font stripped out. Unicode complient inserts are
> > passed through the B-Hebrew mail forwarder.
> 
> They are if they're entered in plain text, but I wonder if
> part of the problem is with how George's software writes
> HTML. Just thinking out loud here. I really don't know why
> it didn't work from his computer through the B-Hebrew
> server, but I don't think your explanation is plausible.
> >
> > Peter mentioned in an earlier message that the SBL font is
> > a Windows™ font. That could be the problem.
> 
> Again, that should have nothing to do with how the text is
> encoded.
> 
> Trevor Peterson
> CUA/Semitics

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