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All Pickering pages are tested with versions 3 of the following
browsers: Netscape, Opera, and Internet Explorer
Now, let's set out to make your browser Hebrew capable. It's a simple
enough operation, and completely reversable! You will only be adding
some special fonts to your collection, and accessing them when needed.
This requires some effort on your part, maybe a little learning, and a
certain amount of technical finagling. Of course, once these relatively
simple steps are done, your browser will immediately be able to show you
Hebrew sites. It can not guarantee that you will understand what you
see. There are other sites for that.
Please note, that both Opera 3 O3 and Netscape 3
NS3 will allow you to see Hebrew, if the required
fonts are installed and selected. Sources for these fonts, and
installation suggestions will follow below. The MS Explorers
IE3 or IE4 are the Hebrew versions,
so they are already Hebrew capable. These Hebrew versions of IE
will only work with Hebrew Windows. Any other version of
Explorer will require using the Hebrew fonts, just as in Opera and
Netscape.
There are several alternatives to installing the Hebrew enabling fonts.
Aside from the Hebrew Explorers, there are multilingual browsers
available from Alis.
They also market HTML editing software. The latter has a Netscape
multilingual plugin.
You will be able to find much useful information about setting up your
browser at the Snunit education
site, a service attached to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Another
excellent source is MACAM98 -
The National Teachers' Colleges Network Hebrew resources. I shall
include the promised details here, but I strongly recommend that you
visit Snunit or MACAM. Once your browser is Hebrew capable you can
return to those sites, and access the interesting links there.
Incidentally, you may eventually discover that many Hebrew sites are
very slow to load. This is partially due to the heavy use made of
graphics to display Hebrew, and obviate the code problems mentioned
above. The slow loading is also true, because many Hebrew webmasters
are still at the bells and whistles stage of web design. It's definitely
getting better, though. Snunit loads fast!
Even if you have a Hebrew word processor, like Dagesh, Accent or QText,
and you have a collection of Hebrew fonts, that does not enable you to
read Hebrew properly on your browser. You must install special Hebrew
enabling fonts, which will portray Latin letters when needed, and Hebrew
letters when needed. At the present level of technology, you will
not be able to see most accented letters, as required in French,
Spanish or German, when you use the Hebrew enabling fonts. If you do
access various languages, other than English and Hebrew, it is a good
idea to install a switching system.
Download the Fonts
You will require different font software, depending on the operating
system you use. You can jump over to Snunit, and go to their main FTP
site for the various Hebrew fonts, or you can
go directly to the site for PC Windows
fonts installation and FAQ, or Mac fonts
installation and FAQ, or Unix / Linux fonts
installation and FAQ.
Download the appropriate fonts, and follow the instructions for
installation on your hard disk. It is NOT enough that the fonts be
physically present on your hard disk, however. They must be selected in
your browser, for web page display.
Selection in the Browser
Selecting the new Hebrew enabling fonts is a little different in each of
the browsers. I shall consider each of the three most frequently used
browsers, as used in Windows 95. The installation instructions for each
font will also give system and browser specific details. If you are
using another browser, you be the pioneer and tell me how to do it.
When the fonts you have downloaded are already installed in the fonts
folder, you can proceed to select them in the browser.
If you are using IE3, just click on View and
select Options at the bottom of the list. Choose the
General tab, and then on to Font Settings at the bottom
right hand corner. You must make two selections of the Hebrew enabling
font once for proportional and once for fixed width fonts.
If your preferred browser is NS3, click on
Options, and choose General Preferences. Select the tab
Fonts. You will see For the encoding and two windows for
proportional and fixed width fonts. Each window opens a drop down list
of languages. You will probably want to leave the Latin selection
as is, and scroll down to the User Define. Here select the Hebrew
enabling font. Somewhere along the line, you should select which one is
to be the default font. I have had some curious problems on my Hebrew
95, and I have the NS3 set up with the Hebrew fonts in
Latin and the standard Times New Roman in User Define.
Opera is a new browser on the market, making quite a splash with its
small footprint and very fast operation. The icon up above will take you
to their homepage, if you want to take a look. If you are using
O3, you will discover that it has many advantages, but
changing fonts is not one of them. It can be done, but it is cumbersome.
The developers are aware of the problem, and promise a solution with a
future release. We can't wait for that, so click on Preferences,
then Font and background. You will be presented with a list of
all the HTML font options, and you will have to select the Hebrew
enabling font for each of the fourteen possibilities. It's a pain, but
once done, it turns Opera into a Hebrew enabled browser! One small
complication is that if you want to enter Hebrew in a web form, you must
be running a Hebrew Windows, and the fonts selected for form input must
be the MS Western/Hebrew options.
Switching Systems
As mentioned above, the change in fonts permits you to see Hebrew in
your browser, but, at the same time, it eliminates the possibility of
seeing properly accented French or German, or all the other languages
using the extended Latin alphabet. If you frequently access sites in a
variety of languages, you will not want to go through all the steps
above, in order to adapt your browser to each new one.
Happily, there are solutions. My IEH3 (the Hebrew
version of the MS Explorer) has a handy little button right on the
screen, which enables me to select Western or Hebrew fonts on the fly,
but that's only good if you're using Hebrew 95.
In NS3, you need only click on Options, then on
Document encoding, then on Latin or User define to
switch between Hebrew and the accented Latin font. This accesses the
decisions you made when you defined these two choices above. Remember,
if you are not in need of accented letters, you can leave the setting on
the Hebrew enabling font. English looks fine that way, though the Latin
letters seem to be less attractive.
Since O3 is not really set up for such changes, it
requires a bit more effort to convince it to convert, but it can be
done. Clearly, you are not going to make fourteen changes when you want
to switch from Le Monde to Snunit. I created a second INI file for
Opera, with a different name. [ oprea.ini ] I then made a copy of the
Opera icon, and in one added the path to the new INI at the end of the
command line. [ "C\Program Files\Opera\Opera.exe" C\windows\oprea.ini
] One Opera iteration I set up in the normal fashion, for European style
accented characters; and the second, with the Hebrew enabling fonts
selected in all fourteen font choices. There is only one Opera on my
hard disk, but, depending on the icon I click, I have a Western version
or a Hebrew version.
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