NSM

The third Nordic conference on Middle Eastern Studies:
Ethnic encounter and culture change
Joensuu, Finland, 19-22 June 1995

Proceedings Archive

Transliteration

While there are many ways displaying Arabic transliterated characters on various types of computers, there is at the moment no proper way of doing so across the net. All methods for displaying transliteration diacritics, be it through special fonts or formatting commands, are specific to the computer they were created on, there is e.g. no font for diacritics that will work both on a PC and a Mac.

Thus diacritics should not really be used on the Web, because proper network services should appear identical irrespectivly of the computer system used to read them. One should adhere to accepted standards.

I fully subscribe to this philosophy, and the "proper" or "real" Proceedings Archive is the one listed on the main contents page, where diacritics have been removed from the papers.

However, I can also not hold back from experimenting, and therefore I have created an experimental and halfway "hidden" duplicate of the archive, where the diacritics remain in place in those papers that used them. Since I had to choose one standard for display, I chose my own set of transliteration fonts, the Jaghbub set (for the Macintosh). Thus, if you are reading this from a Mac and have got Jaghbub installed, you may read these papers as they originally were written.

You must choose Jaghbub or one of its sister fonts (Bairut, Koufra, CourierD, MonacoD etc.) as the display font for your Web program. You do so in this way in the various programs:

  • Netscape. In Netscape, you choose Preferences from the Options menu. There is a submenu at the top of the dialog box (it probably says "Windows and Link styles"); from this choose "Fonts and colors". You will then find the option: "Use the proportional font"; choose "Jaghbub" or one of its sister fonts (Jaghbub equals Times. There is also a "Fixed Font" option; I don't use that in this archive, so you may leave it alone -- if you want to change, CourierD and MonacoD are fixed-width diacritic fonts). -- A tip: It is in the same panel that you can choose window background colour, so that you can get rid of Netscape's awful grey background. Click OK and the change is stored.
    Notice that this will be displayed properly only in Netscape 1. Netscape 2.0 has changed its way of handling such characters, so a number of diacritic characters will be displayed incorrectly in Netscape 2. If, however, you are adventurous, I have changed the relevant resource back, so that Netscape 2 corresponds to all other network programs in this respect. You can download the hack from here. (You need to know you way around ResEdit to do this.)

  • MacWeb. Here, you choose the font under the Styles item in the Edit menu. MacWeb gives you greater control, you can set different fonts for various elements. For my pages, what you want to change is Root and Headers H1, H2 and H3.

  • Mosaic. Again, choose Styles, here under the Options menu. In the panel, choose the top left option, "Doc". You must then check the "Check Font" check box before you can choose the font of your choice, which will then be the standard font to be used throughout Mosaic. This is OK for our use. Remember to click the Apply button before closing the window.

    Notice that you have now changed the general font of your program, not just when reading my pages. However, except that some headlines may become slightly jagged and certain less used symbols appear as diacritic characters, that should not be noticeable. Change back if you don't like it.

    If have a Macintosh, but didn't know about the Jaghbub fonts and is intrigued by all of this, check the Jaghbub page for further information on these fonts (or click here to download them - 662K).

    Knut S. Vikør
    3.8.95

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