>Here is the question I am now very interested in.
>How do you encode HTML in Semitic? Do you code from right to left, and
>how? Japanese certainly can not do this. We are stuck with left to right.
Hi Hiro,
Apparently there are two different ways to do it, but it did not work for
me. I once stored the following info (below) about Hebrew and HTML, and
I no longer recall where I found it, but it offers some interesting info.
My guess is that it should also work for Japanese, but I simply don't know.
As for email, there is also a utility called Direction (Service), which
can change the direction to right -> left from the Services Menu, but it
is not working in PM. Might work elsewhere with a Japanese keyboard, but
I don't know any Japanese alas.
All the best
Willem
****
Creating Hebrew Documents on the Web
Creating readable Hebrew documents for the Web is a challenge. The two
main difficulties with HTML documents containing Hebrew are:
encoding the Hebrew letters into a readable text
displaying them properly from right to left, and inserting line breaks
properly on the left when the HTML editor is looking for them on the right
There are currently two ways to create Hebrew documents for the Web:
logical and visual Web coding.
Logical documents, where the Hebrew is typed and stored from Left ToRight
( LTR ), are easier to create, but they cannot be read by some of
the older browsers.
Visual documents, where the Hebrew is entered and stored from Right
ToLeft ( RTL ), are more difficult to create, but used to be
accessible to a wider variety of browsers and operating systems. For
this reason, many files were originally created this way.
Click here for a more detailed explanation of these two types of coding,
and the problem of directionality in Hebrew Web documents.
We recommend that you create logical Hebrew documents according to the
following guidelines:
Create the text of the document, as you would like it to appear, as a
regular Hebrew Word document on the PC, or as a Mellel document on the Mac.
Copy this text into the <body> section of an HTML document.
In the <Head> section of your HTML file, the following line must appear:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-8-i">
for the PC, and
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
for the Mac.
At the beginning of the text section of the file, add the instruction
<div dir="rtl" align="right">
If you want your Hebrew text to appear in the center, use
<div dir="rtl" align="center">
Close the </div> tag at the end of the text.
Note that if you insert a table, the table should be bracketed with a
<div> tag that reads only <div align="right"> .
Every piece of English text in the file, including numbers, must be
bracketed by the following tag:
<bdo dir="ltr"> English text </bdo>
Format the text with all the regular HTML instructions. Do not be alarmed
at how the text may appear in the viewing feature of your HTML
editor; what may appear to be backwards in the editor will probably
appear correctly once moved to the server and viewed in a web browser.
We advise that you check your results in several browsers, on a PC and on
a Mac.
