Old English Pages: Working with Old English text on the Web

Old English Pages:
Working with Old English text on the Web

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Klaus Weide, via the lynx developer's list, for making the crucial connection to MacOS Icelandic encoding and pointing me to several useful documents on the Web. Thanks also to Robert Asgeirsson of the Icelandic National League of North America for pointing me to further resources. Special thanks are also due to the people of Iceland, without whom we would not have thorn and eth in ISO Latin-1 and HTML!

Note for Mac users: Indispensible software

PopChar: Control panel (freeware). Click on a character in the current font to see keystrokes and hex and decimal values or to enter it in a document. Available from the InfoSoft WWW Server page.
Ascii Chart: Desk accessory (shareware). Select a font; shows chart, with hex and decimal values and keystrokes. Available in the American Online Desktop and Web Publishing Forum library. Also in the University of Michigan Mac Archive, under system.extensions/DA.

I. Making Old English text for the Web

Documents on the Web should be written in hypertext markup language (HTML), which allows text to be displayed properly on a variety of computers. It is possible to put up a non-HTML document with special characters entered from your keyboard (e.g. for ash, thorn, eth and accented vowels), but the characters will often display incorrectly on other computers. Please don't do this! If you are in doubt about which characters require HTML tags, have a look at Martin Ramsch's ISO 8859-1 Table.

The HTML character tags for Old English characters are given below. If any of these are garbled, see viewing.

Tag	Character	Example
Æ	Æ	Ælfric -->	Ælfric
æ	æ	ælfric -->	ælfric
Ð	Ð	Ða -->	Ða
ð	ð	ða -->	ða
Þ	Þ	Þa -->	Þa
þ	þ	þa -->	þa

Notes:

Old English long vowels can be represented using the HTML for acute accents, e.g. á (á), é (é), í (í), ó (ó), ú (ú), ý (ý).
HTML does not currently have tags for yogh, wynn, the Tironian sign (for and or ond), or barred thorn (abbreviating þæt). As replacements, you can use 'g' for yogh, 'w' for wynn, '7' or '&' for the and symbol. For the barred thorn, you could simply use thorn by itself, or 'þ(æt)'. I don't recommend using tiny inline images for these characters, since they will cause problems for lynx users and for search and indexing software.

Extended Example
HTML	Ða gerad Æðelwald his fædran sunu þone ham æt Winburnan.
Result	Ða gerad Æðelwald his fædran sunu þone ham æt Winburnan.
(gif)

As you can see, it is a simple matter to type a small amount of Old English text for the Web. For large documents, however, you will want to either use an HTML converter, or use your word processor 'replace' function to replace OE characters with their HTML tags. Mac note: because thorn and eth are not standard in the Mac character set, your HTML converter probably will not convert them correctly.

II. Viewing Old English text on the Web

II.1 lynx

If you're using lynx to view Old English text on the Web and the OE characters don't display properly, you may be discouraged. Don't be -- there's hope! First, encourage your system administrator to upgrade to the latest version of lynx (not sure which version? Under Unix, type lynx -version).

PC Users: read IBMPC-charsets.announce at the lynx 2.5 site. It looks like you should be able to view Old English text properly, with a little work.
Mac users: lynx 2.5 includes an option to set the character set to Macintosh: select O)ption, then C)haracter set. If you choose the Macintosh character set, thorn is displayed as 'p' and eth as 'dh'. This is non-standard and confusing (over e-mail, most Anglo-Saxonists do use 'dh' for eth, but use 'th' for thorn). The other option is to leave the character set at its default setting, which should be ISO Latin-1. If you choose ISO Latin-1, what you do next depends on how you are accessing lynx: e.g. using Telnet with a SLIP/PPP connection, or terminal emulation software with a dial-in line.
lynx + NCSA Telnet 2.7: In Telnet, pull down the Session menu and set the translation to ISO 8859-1 instead of 'none'. That will give you ae ligature ('æ') and most accented vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú). For thorn, eth and accented y, you now need a special font that follows the MacOS Icelandic encoding. [A complete font set for the Mac is available from Apple Iceland.] Since NCSA Telnet only works with strictly fixed-width fonts (and boldface characters must be the same width as plain characters), however, the choices are very limited. One such font is Kermit Font A, available from Columbia University at ftp://kermit.columbia.edu/kermit/charsets/ (get the file maclatin.hqx).
lynx + Kermit 0.993: Kermit is a popular freeware terminal emulation program that is used for dialling in to a host computer. When Kermit is used to access lynx, the built-in default font ('VT100') will display thorn, eth, and all the accented vowels correctly. Under the Settings menu, choose Terminal and select the option to accept 8-bit characters. For the character set, choose ISO Latin-1. Note: the character set selection seems to get reset each time lynx is invoked; when this happens, simply reset it to ISO Latin-1.
lynx + ZTerm 1.0.1: ZTerm is a popular shareware terminal emulation program that is used for dialling in to a host computer. Like Telnet and Kermit, it requires a strictly fixed-width font. Unlike NCSA Telnet, however, ZTerm does not appear to include a translation from the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding to Mac encoding. When ZTerm is used to access lynx, the result is that you will see a variety of strange characters in place of all the Mac special characters (not just thorn and eth) unless you tell ZTerm to transmit the 8th bit and use a special 'ISO Latin-1' font.
ISO Latin-1 fonts for the Mac are rare. The only one I know of is Robert Pellerin's ISO Latin-1, a fixed-width bitmapped font based on Monaco (see the Old English Fonts page). A problem is that boldface is wider than the plain characters, though, so that any text (like this page) with boldface will mar the screen display. However, most Old English texts on the Web have very little boldface.
1. In Zterm, Pull down the 'Settings' menu and select 'Terminal'. In the dialogue box, uncheck the option that reads 'No Extended Chars (Strip hi-bit)'.
2. In this same dialogue box, select a fixed-width ISO Latin-1 font from the Fonts menu.

II.2 Graphical Web browsers

This section is for Mac users using graphical Web browsers (e.g. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mosaic).

Viewing Old English documents with graphical browsers requires a font that uses the MacOS Icelandic encoding, e.g. Times OE. [A complete font set for the Mac is available from Apple Iceland.] The six special characters in the MacOS Icelandic encoding are thorn, eth, and accented y.

HTML tag	Code (Decimal)	Character
Æ	174	Æ
æ	190	æ
Ð	220	Ð
ð	221	ð
Þ	222	Þ
þ	223	þ
Ý	160	Ý
ý	224	ý

Mac fonts generally have 'ae ligature' in the right place, but thorn and eth are either missing or inaccessible (standard) or accessible but mapped to codes other than 220-223. The same is true of upper and lowercase accented 'y', needed for Icelandic and the OE long vowels. The solution is to create OE fonts for the Mac which have our characters where Web browsers expect them to be (the MacOS Icelandic encoding). This is what I have done with the Times OE font, using Macromedia Fontographer.

To use Times OE after it is downloaded and installed on your Mac, find the option in your Web browser (Netscape; Internet Explorer; Mosaic) that allows you to set the font. Unfortunately, not all Mac browsers allow you to do this. For example, the current version of the America Online browser (the TCP/Connect II v1.1 browser) will not allow you to set the font. Moreover, it makes no attempt at displaying thorn and eth, but simply leaves the HTML character tags unconverted. If you're a Mac AOL user, you may wish to complain to the management (I have).

Note: browsers generally allow you to specify both a proportional font and a non-proportional, or fixed-width, font. The proportional font (e.g. Times) is used for most displays, while the mono-spaced font (e.g. Courier) is usually used for text inside <tt>, <kbd>, or <pre> tags. Times OE is a proportional font. One fixed-width font that includes the MacOS Icelandic encoding is Kermit Font A; others are available from Apple Iceland.

III. Printing Old English text from the Web

This section is for Mac users. To print an Old English text directly from a Web browser, you need a font that uses the MacOS Icelandic encoding, such as Times OE or the Apple Iceland fonts. If you save the document first, however, and then use a word processor to print it, you can use any of the available Old English fonts -- with a bit of work.

To print a saved Web document using a non-MacOS Icelandic encoded font, you must first replace certain characters (e.g. thorn, THORN, eth, ETH, and upper and lowercase accented y) with their equivalents in the font you want to use. For example, HTML thorn is assigned to code 223 (shift + option + 6), but in many Mac OE fonts, thorn is assigned to 160 (option + t). If you simply change the font for the entire document, you will get the wrong results: for example, what was a thorn on the Web may show up as a 'fl' ligature in the new font. See the font samples on the Old English Fonts page -- compare the 'Netscape' version to the 'native' version for examples of what's in store if you use a non-Web font to print a Web OE document.

Step 1. You may wish to begin by printing the Web document first using Times OE and again using the new font, for reference.
Step 2. Compare the character mappings for the Web to the character mappings for the font you wish to use, e.g. Beowulf-1. One way to do this is use Ascii Chart to print a character chart for Times OE and another for the font you want to use. Identify any relevant differences in decimal values, and make a note of the keystrokes for typing the characters in Times OE and the new font.
Step 3. Now replace the relevant characters in your document with the corresponding characters in the new font, using your word processor's Replace function. For example, to replace a Web lowercase thorn with a lowercase thorn in the Nero font using Microsoft Word (on a US keyboard), type shift + option + 6 in the 'Find What' box, type option + t in the 'Replace With' box, and select 'Replace all' (or, if you're cautious, 'Find Next').
Step 4. After you have converted all relevant characters and changed to the new font, the document should display and print correctly. At this point you may also be able to add characters not supported in HTML if they are in your new font, e.g. yogh and the barred thorn (abbreviating þæt).