You raise some important concerns, and in light of your position and your
importance to this list, we shouldn't do *anything* until we've addressed
your concerns to your satisfaction.
That said, I think we can have our cake and eat it too. The principles you
outline are important, and should be observed:
> One of these principles has been that anyone able to use ancient Greek and
> interested in the NT/LXX texts may participate--without having to:
> Buy a new computer
> Learn a new scheme of transliteration
> Be required to use the above
> Have Windows 95
> Subscribe to an ISP which offers more than email
> Be able to use Netscape
> Use non-ASCII fonts
> Etc., Etc.
Agreed. These are all important criteria. Which means that any scheme we use
to display fonts must be (1) optional - anybody can continue posting using
the schemes we are currently using, and (2) readable in ASCII without
imposing making it much harder. The idea that I have proposed allows someone
to use fonts by adding a few tags that can easily be ignored, e.g.
En arxh hn o( logos, kai o( logos hn pros ton qeon, kai qeos hn o( logos.
I think this is pretty easy to read in ASCII email. Just ignore the <html>
and <font> tags and read the Greek. On the web site, though, the text shows
up in Greek. To make this email-friendly, we should make sure that we use a
font with an encoding scheme that also makes sense in ASCII. We *might* even
consider customizing the encoding scheme for exactly this reason.
> Seeing a lot of garbage on my screen would destroy B-Gredek
> for me. And the newcomers would certainly have it worse than I would.
Would the above text be too hard to read?
> Some Lists require use of a certain scheme. We have resisted that, and in
> fact "officially" rejected it, agreeing on a fairly common scheme (not the
> one I ordinarily use, incidentally) as the one to suggest to those who want
> advice. But we have agreed that ANY scheme is OK, since we can usually
> make out the point--and we all have a hardcopy of the GNT at hand (which I
> always open up when I start to follow a discussion on the List).
I think we should continue saying that any ASCII scheme is OK. I would *not*
want to support more than one font, though, and that font would have to be
(1) based on a transliteration scheme that supports readable ASCII, (2)
downloadable for free, and (3) available on Windows, Mac, and DOS.
> Please, don't force me off the List! (But if you really want to, here's a
> quick way to do it, I guess.) Even if you used MY scheme, you'd force me
> off.
Actually, I think that you have the authority to say no to any scheme we
propose, since you are the head of the B-Greek staff. Please *do* say no if
we don't come up with something that convinces you.
> [Took me half an hour to peck this out, with my cast landing on dozens of
> wrong keys, and my Backspace working overtime to edit!]
I guess you *do* feel strongly about this ;->
I hope you recover quickly.
Jonathan
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Jonathan Robie
POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703
Ph: 919.598.5728 Fax: 919.598.6728
email: jwrobie@mindspring.com, jonathan@poet.com
http://www.poet.com <--- shockwave enabled!
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