Hebrew text entry gizmo

[lethargic_man]

At home, when I'm writing a blog post (or anything else) with Hebrew in, it's quite convenient; I have Emacs ready to hand with the Hebrew mode I made for it. At work, it's rather less convenient; and anywhere else, it's downright inconvenient: I have to fire up Word, and, using "Insert symbol", insert the characters one at a time, taking several mouse clicks to do each.

Fed up with this, I have made myself a little web-based Hebrew text entry gizmo, and offer it up here because I think it might be of use to other readers of this journal.

Note that this does not utilise the standard Hebrew keyboard layout; it's intended for (people like) myself, who do not know the standard Hebrew keyboard layout, and want a layout in which, as much as possible, Hebrew letters are generated by their QWERTY equivalents.

Because I wrote this primarily for myself, it's also not been tested other than on Firefox 1.5 on Linux and Windows, and IE 6 on Windows. If people have issues with it on other browsers, let me know (though I do not promise to necessarily do anything about it).

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

It just types in Latin chars on my browser (Mozilla 1.7.8 - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20060628 Debian/1.7.8-1sarge7.1)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Does the JavaScript error console say anything? (And, for that matter, do you have JavaScript enabled?)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Error: jemail is not defined
Source File: http://www.michaelgrant.dsl.pipex.com/hebrew_entry.html
Line: 199

Error: missing variable name
Source File: http://www.michaelgrant.dsl.pipex.com/hebrew_entry.html
Line: 10, Column: 8
Source Code:
var char = "";

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Odd; I've been using jemail for ages and never noticed a problem yet. It's certainly there in the source, and Firefox 1.5 is happy with it. <finds a computer with Mozilla 1.7.6> Hmm.. . <digs around in menus> How do you access the JavaScript console on this? (And how good's your JavaScript anyway?)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Tools, Web Development, Javascript Console. My javascript knowledge isn't great, but I can cope with it given a search engine to find documentation.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Try replacing all instances of "char" with something looking less like a reserved word? Seems to help.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Closer now, but no cigar. And it's also complaining "window.handleEvent is not a function"; must have been introduced in a later version of JavaScript... May look further into this later, after work...

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I don't get the window.handleEvent stuff; might be something fixed between versions.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Do you get the extraneous Latin characters appearing after every Hebrew one?

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I did when I replaced "char", yes.