Category Archives: coding

Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing

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Given that one important aspiration of the Open Siddur Project is the development of a web application for anyone to edit, maintain, and share the content of a personal prayerbook that they can craft online, I’m very concerned at how well web browsers today display the Hebrew language with all of its diacritical (vowels, cantillation) and punctuation marks. Indeed, the Open Siddur Project has an international scope, so ostensibly, we wish to support text in every language Jews speak or have ever spoken liturgy or liturgy-related text (the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice). Combine a digital font or fonts that support the full range of human written languages with a platform that correctly displays such fonts, and you have one basis for an excellent potential collaborative publishing platform.

So for the last year, I’ve been working on a series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

Cross-posted to the Open Siddur Project.

Varady’s Fabulous Flying Keyboard

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Varady's Fabulous Flying Keyboard (Level 1)

Behold my Flying Keyboard!

Ever want a keyboard configuration you could switch to for odd characters‽ You know, so you could add an Ḥ in Ḥanukah without copying and pasting from this page (or your favorite “Character Viewer” program).

Well I made such a keyboard configuration that you can download and install on your very own computer. (Only works for Windows OS, alas.) Download, unzip and install.

The keyboard layout includes glyphs mapped onto the universal and international standard Unicode character encoding schema. You’ll have to use the layout along with a font (e.g. DejaVu Sans) that supports all of these glyphs. Such fonts are installed with the popular, cross-platform, free/libre and open source LibreOffice application.

Varady's Fabulous Flying Keyboard (Level 2)

I was tired of using the Windows Character Viewer to access a number of useful character glyphs including the Ḥ. So I made my own keyboard layout using the proprietary but free-without-fee program called “Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator v1.4.” (Windows only, although it’s also possible to do something similar for Macs and Linux.) If you want to hack the keyboard layout I made, I’ve included the layout in a directory named “source” in the zip which also includes the images above.

Mac keyboard layouts are directly modifiable using a 3rd party free-without-fee tool called Ukelele. Re: Linux, like much of the rest of the configuration on *nix type systems, keyboard layouts for the X Window System are defined in easily editable text files. See this page for more info.)

UPDATE: For Windows users, Steg adds this useful information,

Go to your System Setttings and find the Language/Keyboard settings and add the input method “U.S. Extended”. Then start using it. To type a Ḥ type option-x and then H.

Netflix Widget for WordPress

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This post goes out to all the wordpress users out there who wanted to use Albert Banks’ Netflix Plugin for WordPress but were frustrated at the plugin not being accessible as a sidebar widget. I added some code to widgetize the plugin that I adapted from this goodreads plugin. If you want you can download what I wrote and then you too can tell the world more than they ever wanted to know about your DVD rental habits.

If you look at the code and see what I added (in the section commented “wigetized” [sic]), you’ll notice that I’m shunning CSS markup for good old table formatting. I also changed a line under “switch display type”to make the widget look pretty in the sidebar. I’ve got it working in the sidebar here if you’re looking for an example of how it will look.

After you ftp the plugin into your wordpress install, you’ll still need to change the Netflix plugin settings in the wordpress backend. To make the table formatting work I have each entry start with a [tr] tag and end with a [/tr] tag. See below:

Also, you’ll need to go to the widgets menu to add the Netflix widget that should appear there.

Maybe you’re thinking that somebody should already have done this by now. You’re right. Except it’s missing. Back in 2006 Chris Stanley over at ongoingprocess.net announced he had made a widget to work with Albert Banks’ as yet unwidgetized Netflix plugin. I searched for it in vain at his site but the link he provided had become broken at some point and was never fixed. Perhaps Stanley will dig it up someday and make it available again. Until then, you can try this out. Hope it works for you.