On Fri, 17 May 2002, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> The big question, is how many of the people who actually contribute to
> the list could not and would not read the above sentance. As it
> appears that the answer is "most of them!", please refrain from
> posting hebrew.
>
> FWIW, I immediately delete hebrew postings. If it's important enough
> to be said, it's important enough to be said in english.
>
I believe that at least 99% of this list's subscribers post from:
1. text-mode clients
1.1 in an xterm or another X11 terminal emulation
1.2 in a linux console
1.3 in a terminal emulation from a windows system
2. X11 client
3. Windows/Mac mail client
4. web-based mail client
Generally I believe that for (2), (3) and (4) Hebrew support is in varying
level of support. In most cases it could be at least improvised. But in
this post I'd like to focus on (1):
Recall that to have Hebrew support you have to be able to view Hebrew
characters (font and charsets), type Hebrew (Hebrew keyboard) and convert
logical Hebrew to visual Hebrew (bidi).
Hebrew fonts:
""""""""""""
Generally avaialble anywhere:
on basically any X distibution you can run:
xterm -fn heb8x13
to get a terminal with an ISO-8859-8 font. Hebrew fonts are available: the
X11 distribution comes with a misc-fixed font that cover relatively large
parts of unicode charsets, including the Hebrew ones. And you can download
true-type fonts from microsoft.com/typography .
In the linux console: the kbd distribution (avvailable from the near-by
kernel mirror, and part of basically any distro, in one way or another)
includes console ISO-8859-8 ("iso08") fonts that you can use. You can
configure them at startup. I don't remember the exact settings needed at
the moemnt. Probably soemthing like:
consolechars -f iso08.f16 -m iso08
In a windows/Mac system: Here you need to rely on the support of your
system and terminal emulation. In all the terminal emulations I
encountered this wasn't that difficult, unless the system really has no
Hebrew fonts installed. In this case there are other sources for fonts,
e.g: MS-typography mentioned above, as well as Snunit's "web fonts".
Hebrew keyboard support:
"""""""""""""""""""""""
On Windows/Mac terminal emulations you can use the system's Hebrew support
(is there any issue with Mac Hebrew?)
In the linux console you should use the keymap "il-8859_8" (not sure about
the name, this is the name from Mandrake 8.1, I an still see there a
bogus "hebrew" keymap.)
In X: Invery old X servers you don't have the Xkb extentions and you have
to revert to using xmodmap (or kde1's kikbd, which I find useful
sometimes, on Solaris 8). There is also the issue of "8bit" keymaps vs.
correct keymapping:
http://www.iglu.org.il/faq/cache/85.html
In short: there are some small technical difficulties, and this is a
subject for a different post. This post is long enough. But nothing that
is not easily solvable, unless you need to write in Both Hebrew and
another Language (say Arabic, or Russian) and in a "legacy" application
(legacy: not unicode-based - not gtk2, qt>=2, mozilla, openoffice?)
Bidirectional Hebrew:
""""""""""""""""""""
I find that for reading Hebrew mail it is enough to have a terminal
emulation with reasonable bidi support. Such available terminals:
* a terminal emulation on a windows/Mac system with bidi support
(actually, sometimes you need to set the font to "web hebrwe" to avoid the
bidi support). Note that putty does have an annoying refreshing bug, as
Orna previously mentioned.
This is not enough for composing messages (except relatively shrt ones),
though, because editing Hebrew text in a bidi terminal is not nice. For
that oyu need an editor that follows the cursor (even though I encountered
one exception to this).
on X you have the following terminals with bidi support:
mlterm (MultiLingual TERMinal)
http://mlterm.sf.net
(apt-get install mlterm on debian woody/sid)
I must admit that I have not yet been able to get bidi from it.
There is an unmailtained and probably buggy patch to the standard xterm to
add bidi support along with some other features. I don't recall the
current URL, only the RPM I made from it (slightly modified xterm of
mandrake 8.1):
http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/Packages/Enhance/Sources/xterm-156-8haifux.src.rpm
http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/Packages/Enhance/xterm-156-8haifux.i586.rpm
BTW: ththe standard 'xterm' of mandrake 8.1 has this patch. Yes, it has
bidi support. If it doesn't crash for the first sight of a Hebrew
character it will work fine, I figure.
To get a somewhat less good result you can run basically any terminal
emulation under biditext. It will give basically the same support for
displaying messages, but even worse for editing messages.
http://www.linux.org.il/faq/cache/129.html
Regarding the linux console: I believe you should try Akka
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Akka
(Haven't tried it myself, looks like I should)
Composing:
"""""""""
You can write logical Hebrew in $EDITOR . Any decent edtor should accept
Hebrew character. But composing without being able to properly read what
you write is a problem.
I normally switch to vim whenever I need to write something that is
non-trivial in Hebrew. Note that vim has a problem with parens: the Hebrew
support reverses them.
Conclusion:
""""""""""
Except in composing, with some configuration work you can probably
configure your environment to read Hebrew in a text-mode mail client.
Composing may be a bit more tricky, waiting for follow-ups here.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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