On Fri, May 17, 2002, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote about "Re: official hebrew in Linux-IL mailing lists?": > FWIW, I immediately delete hebrew postings. If it's important enough > to be said, it's important enough to be said in english.
If he knew of this thread, Eli'ezer Ben-Yehuda (are you a relative of his? :)) would be turning in his grave :( I'm hope I'm not wasting my breath here, but all you need in order to read Hebrew (besides *knowing* the language, of course, which indeed might be a problem) is my bidiv program which can convert any iso8859-8-i, win1255 or utf8 email into visual iso8859-8 which you could view with less, more, nvi, cat, or whatever you're so inclined. Bidiv (unlike the "fribidi" binary) is fully automatic, and tries to guess which Hebrew encoding it is seeing, so someone who doesn't need to read other languages (say, russian encodings) can even use "bidiv | less" as his default mail pager. That's what I do. A non-released version of bidiv (tell me if you're interested) can also automatically handle the case where your output should be utf8, not iso8858-8. So reading Hebrew email is easy. Writing is somewhat harder if you *insist* on using an Editor with no Hebrew support, which is somewhat like insisting that the C language sucks because "f77" doesn't compile it and f77 is the compiler you know and prefer. If you want to write an Hebrew message, use vim and not nvi (or write a patch to nvi yourself). How difficult is that? Don't give me the "but I switched!" bull - they are not that different, and it wouldn't kill you to use vim once in a blue moon when you want to write Hebrew emails. I occasionally write and read Hebrew emails, and it's not hard. I still prefer to read and write in English, though, so I'd personally prefer to continue writing on the English list (but I don't mind reading both). As a sidenote, one of the best ways to get people to work on Hebrew support is to "make" them need to use it, see how inconvenient it is and want to fix it. This is how/why I worked on my version of the LaTeX 2.09 Hebrew support, for example - the Technion forced me to write my MSc thesis in Hebrew (the rules have since changed, and people can write in English now). Anyway, to make myself clear: I'll vote for an additional Hebrew list, but for keeping also the existing English list. -- Nadav Har'El | Friday, May 17 2002, 6 Sivan 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Committee: A group of people that keeps http://nadav.harel.org.il |minutes and wastes hours. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
