Maintainer
Maintained by Dick Schoeller.
Last modified: 12 September 2007
At Melissa's siddur party at SSDS, 1999.
I've taken the Torah trope practice exercise that Cantor Harry Gelman put together and made a collection of MPEG-3 files. You can select individual files to play or pull down the ZIP file of the whole set.
The list below tries to display the names of the trope in Hebrew with vowels and trope symbols. Netscape 6 and Mozilla 0.8.1 and eariler on RedHat Linux 6.2 can't seem to figure out the trope marks or the vowels, thus it displays question marks. I suspect that this is a result of the lack of Unicode font handling in the X Window System. I recently upgraded both the operating system and the browser and this has improved. I now get both the trope and vowels.
In Internet Explorer 5.1 Unicode font handling seems to find all of the symbols. However, the horizontal placement of vowels and trope marks has problems. You will sometimes see them above, below or in the corresponding consonant as expected. However, some of the trope, and most combinations of a trope and a vowel, cause IE to display them after the consonant.
Netscape also completely disregards the bidirectional algorithms of Unicode and the direction specifiers in HTML. This is not resolved with the upgrades that I described. This document has all of its text ordered logically. Thus is looks like the Hebrew is backward in Netscape and its relatives. Now that I have finished with the complete text (I don't have a UTF-8/Hebrew HTML editor so this is laborious), I am producing a visual order version for Netscape users.
If this is not displaying the Hebrew at all, then you need fonts. I use the TrueType fonts from Microsoft and a shareware font called Code2000. The best way to get the Microsoft fonts is through the Internet Explorer update function. This will take you to a page where you can download and install fonts on your Windows system. It is possible to transfer these to your Linux system if you have configured your font server correctly.
The following are quotes from the "Anyone can be provincial!" page.