Biblical Studies
Charles Conroy [www.cjconroy.net]



Practical Hints and Information Concerning the Site


1.  Site markup

The site is written in HTML 4.01 Strict linked to external Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 2). As such it should display correctly in all browsers, except for badly outdated ones where the formatting may be imperfect in places.

2.  Printer-friendly pages

While you are online, every page should print in printer-friendly format which will differ from the screen display in some respects in order to give a better printing result (omitting navigation bars, changing the font, and so on). This is achieved by the use of special CSS print style-sheets, which are activated automatically by the normal print command of your browser.
If you prefer to print offline from pages that you saved to your own computer, please note that the printer-friendly format will probably not be available (as far as I can see at present) and the pages will print as displayed on screen.
In a word, for better results print online.

3.  Saving material to your own computer

a)  If you wish to save the formatting (which is to a very large extent governed by a linked external CSS style-sheet) as well as the content of the page, you should use the command "Save as" of your browser with the following options:

In all these cases the formatting file will be downloaded as well as the content of the page.

b)  If all you need is the unformatted content, then you can "Save as" with these options:

Please note however that in a page saved in this second way Greek and Hebrew words may occasionally not display perfectly (especially as regards Greek accents and Hebrew vowel points). See the next note.

4.  Greek and Hebrew characters

Greek and Hebrew and other special characters in these pages are written in Unicode. For the most part they should display reasonably well under Windows XP and Windows Vista, since several basic fonts always present in these operating systems are now Unicode-compliant (Times New Roman, Arial, and a few others). However these standard fonts do not contain all the Unicode characters needed for pointed Hebrew and accented polytonic Greek, so there may be some difficulties for Greek accents and Hebrew vowel points (which anyway are used rarely enough on these pages).

If you wish to improve the situation, you could download and install some good Unicode fonts which have all the requisite characters for the biblical languages. A few suggestions:

SBL Hebrew: Probably the best Unicode font for biblical Hebrew; go to the free download page here [http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx], and see further useful information here [http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts.aspx].

SBL Greek: A Unicode font for biblical Greek, released in March 2009; go to the free download page here [http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLGreek.aspx]. For further information see the link under SBL Hebrew above.

Cardo: This is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists. Full Greek range is available and many other characters too, including Hebrew (though SBL Hebrew is generally regarded as better for this). Free download with information [http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html] (the download includes a useful manual). See also the homepage [http://scholarsfonts.net/] of the author of the font, classicist David J. Perry, with more news and information about Unicode fonts.

Further information can be found on the following two pages: "Fonts for Biblical Study" [http://www.tyndalehouse.com//Fonts/index.htm] from Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK, and a page of useful explanations [http://www.gettysburgseminary.org/mhoffman/greek/fonts.htm] about Unicode Greek and Hebrew and related matters by American biblical scholar M. V. Hoffman.

Finally, with regard to BibleWorks, it is worth noting that the latest version (BW8) internally still uses non-Unicode fonts (bw*.ttf), though it supports Unicode Greek and Hebrew for export and the SBL Hebrew and Greek Unicode fonts are available with the program.

5.  A note for Macintosh users

Not having had the opportunity of testing the site on a Mac system, regrettably I have not been able to refer to Mac browsers (Safari and others) or Mac font questions in the above points. Comments by Mac users will be most welcome (see the email link below).

6.  Contact

Your comments and suggestions can be sent here. They will be much appreciated.


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