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Netscape, Hebrew and encodings



I've been having some trouble getting Netscape and hebrew to work quite
like I want it to.  The following describes my attempts at getting
Netscape 4.X to work, but I've had similar experiences in earlier
versions of netscape.

Just getting hebrew fonts is no big deal:  If you have a hebrew font
which is loaded as iso-8859-1, then you can just select that font as your 
main font.

The problem is that the scalable hebrew fonts I have access to (web and
webmono) have rather unpleasant english faces.  So I'd like to be able to 
switch between them easily.

I thought that what I should do is simply use the "Encoding" menu item,
which allows you to select an encoding.  There are two ways of doing
this, and I've encountered problems with both.  Here are the appraoches:

   Approach 1:  User-Defined Encoding

	There's a user defined encoding, which seems fine for this
	purpose.  So, I set up the hebrew fonts for the user-defined
	encoding, and just switch to that encoding whenever I want to
	view hebrew. 

	Unfortunatly, when netscape comes up against a document that
	specifies its encoding (say, a hebrew document that specifies
	that it is iso-8859-8) then netscape doesn't let you use the
	user-defined encoding.  Unfortunatly, Netscape doesn't have a
	iso-8859-8 encoding set up, so it just switches you back to the
	default western encoding.  Look at http://www.haaretz.co.il for
	an example of a page which does this.

	Which leads me to....


   Approach 2: Set up a hebrew iso-8859-8 encoding in netscape

	I was partially succesful in setting up such an encoding.  If you 
	look at Netscape.ad, there are a bunch of xdefaults that look
	like they might help. Here's what I put in to my .Xdefaults to
	try and set this up:

   Netscape*defaultCharset: 			  iso-8859-8
   Netscape*documentFonts*charsetlang*iso-8859-8: Hebrew
   Netscape*documentFonts*charset*iso8859-8:      iso-8859-8
   Netscape*88598EncCmdString:			  Hebrew (ISO-8859-8)
   Netscape*localeCharset*hb:			  iso-8859-8
   Netscape*spellDialog*langHebrew.labelString:   Hebrew

	As I said, I was partially succesful:  These changes cause a
	hebrew encoding to be set up, so that when you go to the
	preferences panel, there's a hebrwe encoding listed there.

	Unfortunatly, hebrew does _not_ show up in the list of encodings
	under the view->encodings menu, and it does not seem to turn
	itself on when visiting a page marked iso-8859-8.  

	In other words, it shows up in preferences, but it's utterly
	useless.


So, this is the sad state of my experiments with getting hebrew to work
with netscape.  Does anyone else have any positive experiences in this
direction?

(Another question:  I don't like web/webmono very much.  The gimel, in
particular, is hard to read.  I've seen some fonts that are much easier
to read, but they're not scalable.  Are there any readable type1 fonts
out there?  Has anyone by any chance converted any of the TrueType PC
hebrew fonts?)

Yaron

-- 
|--------/      Yaron Minsky      &yod;&qof;&samekh;&nun;&yod;&mem; &fnun;&vav;&resh;&yod;      \--------| 
|--------\ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/yminsky/ /--------|