Problems of Transcription

It is possible to devise a single font which can display two separate alphabets (e.g. Roman and Hebrew), but this has drawbacks. It demands a browser which can handle the font supplied, and the ability to give the browser access to that font. This is a situation which probably does not obtain on many shared platforms (e.g. on a University campus). In addition, the modified font can no longer be capable of providing the full set of Roman accentuation, and is useless for displaying other fonts; e.g. Arabic or Greek.

Another solution, perhaps, is to offer a font which utilises a small number of presently-unused characters to provide extra diacritics: for our purposes the most important are representations for the Hebrew heth, teth, sin, shin, tsade, and Arabic equivalents.

Meanwhile, we shall in general offer transcriptions using web fonts, as single images, and in Romanised transliteration. This last will enable texts to be made available in a form which can be searched, concorded, indexed or copied.

No single transliteration has won universal acceptance; and all those in current use provide difficulties for automated searches. Our own choice is not yet fixed and will depend on the range of facilities for handling the texts which we ultimately make available.