[Sca-cooks] Some Florilegium Jewish info

[Harris Mark.S-rsve60]

Elewyiss asked:

 >>>>

No I wasn't. I don't suppose you have the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabeta<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

hidden somewhere? I'm trying to get a letter for my name.

<<<<

No, I'm afraid not. Most of the information I get, such as the messages off of the net, are in ASCII text. And even when I've gotten messages or files with special charactters I've had problems handling these.

 

In the next few weeks I should finish up my writing of my programs to modify the HTML format generated by Word for the Florilegium. Previously I was converting Word format to text which lost most special attributes and then to HTML. Then when I lost those programs I started using the (ugly) Word HTML output. As part of this latest rewrite, I am beginning to look into using the new unicode-16 or other expansions of ASCII character set. This will help display special characters sent to me in articles but may not help with copies of email programs since various filters such as in the SCA-Cooks Digestifier which creates the digest version of this list may corrupt things before I get the text. It will probably also double or more the size of the files.

 

There still may be a problem of folks being able to display these special characters on their screens unless their software also handles this unicode-16 stuff correctly, though. That is one of the reasons I asked my earlier question about using PDF files. It sounds like most people can handle PDF files but it I were to go only to PDF files I think I would have problems with the search engines being able to find data in the Florilegium. So I've not decided how or whether to handle PDF files. However, I do have one very good article submission on brewing (Meads, I think), which I only have in PDF format because of the enclosed graphics and text.

 

I know the Roman(?) alphabet had a number of changes through the medieval period. You can see these in the old English writings. Did the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabets change during this same time period? I might be interested in some charts or an article on these languages/alphabets if they are of concern to medieval studies.

 

Stefan