Subject: TC articles display Greek & Hebrew

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 03:13:26 -0400 (EDT)

After more than two years of anticipation on my part, the display of 
Greek, Hebrew, and other non-Roman fonts is now possible on the World 
Wide Web.  All of the current articles in TC now have "original script" 
versions, as will all future articles.  The ability to read texts in 
their original scripts is obviously preferable to transliterations, and 
it removes the only significant advantage that print journals had over 
Web journals.  To read the TC articles, you will have to do two things: 
(1) download and install the latest version of Netscape Navigator for 
your Mac, Windows, or Unix computer; (2) download the required font files 
from the Scholars Press FTP site.  For more details, see the TC home page 
(URL given below), and, in particular, the editorial entitled TC Note #2 
(http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/vol01/TCnotes2.html."

Jimmy Adair
General Editor of TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu/scripts/TC/TC.html <-----

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From: Alan Repurk <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Aug 1996 11:52:59 -0700

Good news indeed, but any relief for us Unix folks ?
-lars

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From: "Stephen C Carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 12:32:30 -0400 (EDT)

James R. Adair wrote:
>Wide Web.
[...]
>               To read the TC articles, you will have to do two things: 

I have tested with both the Netscape Navigator 3.0 Beta (level 6) and
the Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.01, and for both of them it works
just great.  My only complaint -- and it's a minor one -- is that the
fonts can be prettier.

Stephen Carlson
-- 
Stephen C. Carlson, George Mason University School of Law, Patent Track, 4LE
[email-masked]              : Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs
http://osf1.gmu.edu/~scarlso1/     : chant the words.  -- Shujing 2.35

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From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Aug 1996 13:45:29 -0400 (EDT)

> just great.  My only complaint -- and it's a minor one -- is that the

I'm glad to know that the fonts work with Internet Explorer as well as
Netscape.  As for the aesthetic qualities of the fonts, I make no claim to
be a font designer, and any font designers on the list certainly have no
need to worry about competition ;).  In fact, if someone wanted to design
a nicer looking Greek font, using the same character map as SPIonic, it
could be named SPIonic on the local system and substituted for our font,
thus improving the display.  The important thing to remember is that the
character maps must match.  If anyone runs across characters that don't 
display properly (particularly on the screen, but also in print) in 
either 10 or 12 point size, I would appreciate hearing about it.  I have 
in mind characters that are unrecognizable or just plain wrong, but I'll 
be glad to at least consider improving particularly ugly letters.

Jimmy Adair

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From: "Stephen C Carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 00:31:20 -0400 (EDT)

James R. Adair wrote:
>character maps must match.

Is the SPIonic font mapping unique, or did it borrow it from another
font?  I'm thinking of the Silver Mountain Software fonts and other
packages.  As far as I can understand the behavior of the HTML
<FONT FACE=> tag, one is allowed to specify multiple font faces to be
tried, e.g., <FONT FACE="SPIonic,Graeca">Mh=nin a)ei/de qea/</FONT>.
But even that trick will only work if the character maps are identical.

>                            If anyone runs across characters that don't 

All I can remember offhand is that the dagesh in the beth is a bit off-
center, but that may be due to fit the narrower gimel.

Stephen Carlson

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From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 09:58:09 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Stephen C Carlson wrote:

(I wrote:)
> >The important thing to remember is that the

Right.  The face attribute allows you to specify up to three fonts to try 
loading, but they must have identical character maps to display 
properly.  We had two primary goals in mind when we designed our fonts: 
ease of use by scholars in the field (that's why we based our fonts on the 
TLG and Michigan-Claremont standard encoding schemes) and compatibility 
between PC and Mac platforms.  Our initial inclination was to take an 
existing, popular font and use the same character map, but there were two 
problems.  First, as far as I can tell, there is no single Greek font, 
for example, that is used by a majority of people, and since the 
character maps vary among the various popular fonts, picking a standard 
would have been arbitrary.  Second, and more importantly, we wanted to 
create fonts that would work on both PCs and Macs.  Because of 
differences between the two platforms, that meant that we restricted 
ourselves to using the characters between 32 and 127 (i.e., ASCII).  
Since none of the fonts I knew about did this, we decided to create our own.

> center, but that may be due to fit the narrower gimel.

We do have more than one character for a single diacritical in our fonts
(e.g., we have four different dageshes), but we don't have as many as most
commercial fonts do, so positioning of breathing marks, accents, and vowel
points may not be as nice in our fonts.  Again, the reasons for this go
back to our desire for ease of use and our self-imposed limitation on
using only valid ASCII characters.  What users should do is to try the
diacritical characters in different combinations to see what looks best to
them.  I have tried to help by specifying that a breathing mark, for
example, is designed for either narrow or wide characters.  I plan to go
back to the readme file and specify what I mean by narrow and wide, but
for Greek, wide vowels are alpha and omega, and all the other vowels (and
rho) are considered narrow.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
---------------> http://scholar.cc.emory.edu <-----------------

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From: "James K. Tauber" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 16:25:30 +0800 (WST)

This announcement came just as I was starting to put up similar 
information on my Hellenistic Greek Linguistics Pages 
http://www.entmp.org/HGrk/

I shall include a pointer to your information.

Furthermore, as the FACE attribute is something the Electronic New Testament 
Manuscripts Project has planned to make use of, I shall ensure that the 
ENTMP uses the same fonts and/or font mapping as Scholars' Press to make 
things easiest for users.

Just one point of correction like to make though. The FACE attribute is not 
infact a Netscape invention. I believe Microsoft's Internet Explorer has 
had it for a while.

Also, it is probably worth noting that while the FACE attribute is an 
excellent solution for the moment, style sheets will ultimately provide a 
better solution because font names then don't have to be hard-wired into 
the documents. While IE already supports this, Netscape doesn't.

James K. Tauber <[email-masked]> http://www.entmp.org/people/jtauber
Associate Director, Electronic New Testament Manuscripts Project