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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/ /--------|