1) Subject:Review of Encyclopedia of Islam, CD-ROM for Mac At long last, E.J. Brill has taken the laudable step of publishing the CD-ROM version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI, New Edn.) in a format accessible not only to PC, but also to Macintosh users. I have recently forwarded Brill's press release on this, and as promised am following it up now with a review. This review is not concerned with the content of the Encyclopaedia, which will be known to most on this list. It will only deal with technical matters, specifically those concerning the Macintosh platform. In its current version, the CD-ROM includes the full text of the eleven main volumes of the EI (that is, the complete alphabet), including maps and images, as well as the Index of Subjects to Volumes I-XI and the Index of Proper Names to Volumes I-X. The Indices are not a simple reproduction of their printed sisters, but have been adapted for electronic use, with lemmata hyperlinked to the relevant entries in the text. Purchase of the CD-ROM also grants access to the online version of the EI, which Brill promises "will gradually be updated and extended". Pricing: Individuals EUR 440.00/USD 550.00; institutions 1-5 users EUR 1445.00/US$ 1806.00; institutions 11 and more users EUR 2895.00/US$ 3619.00 http://www.brill.nl/eicd/ The version reviewed here has clearly improved from Brill's first release of the EI on CD-ROM in 1999 (which was only available to Windows-users at the time). Most importantly, "Find" and "Search" -- two separate ways of searching, which confused many early users -- have been unified into a single "Search" pane much easier to understand and use. Stop words are no longer used in searches, meaning you can search even for the most common words. Search and display operations are reasonably fast -- your mileage may vary of course depending on your hardware. Images are now displayed inline, and can be enlarged in a separate window, unlike the previous version where only a black rectangular box indicated the existence of an image -- this had to be clicked to display the image. Installation and system requirements The Macintosh version needs at least a PowerPC G3 processor running at 233 MHz and 64 MB of RAM. The CD instructions also ask for 200 MB of free disk space, although what ends up on your hard disk after a full install is only 11.7 MB -- in other words, you will need to put the CD in the drive and keep it there in order to run the EI. It is unfortunate that users are not given the choice of installing the full package onto their hard disks, since this would clearly speed up searching. Brill states that the Macintosh version requires "OS 8.1 to 9.x or OS X". This is correct (though I didn't have a chance to test under OS 8), but users of OS X should have been told upfront that the CD installs and runs only in Classic mode. In another restriction, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 is needed to display the CD's content. On the Macintosh platform, MSIE was a good browser for a number of years, but is now being phased out, as Microsoft has stopped its further development. Both these restrictions -- to the Classic environment and to MSIE -- are not really understandable. Content of the CD is displayed using a mixture of HTML and JavaScript. Transliteration relies on Brill's own transliteration fonts ("Baskerville MT for Brill"), which are installed onto your system and then become available system-wide in other applications too (so that you can easily copy and paste text from the EI into other applications; the Macintosh clipboard preserves font information). In other words, with some attention to standards-compliant implementation, any HTML- & JavaScript-aware application should have been capable to render the content of the CD. And indeed, with Brill's Baskerville MT fonts installed into my OS X Fonts folder (easily copied there manually from the OS 9 installation), I am able to read the online version of the EI with various OS X browsers, without recourse to the CD (and with a broadband connection this is at least as fast as the CD). Of the browsers tested under OS X, MS Internet Explorer 5 (I used 5.2.2) renders the online version generally flawlessly (but has problems with links, see below), while Safari (1.0 (v.85)) and Camino (0.7 - a lean derivative of Mozilla) have display problems with the current online version but might be used for occasional reference. Safari displays some words containing diacritics correctly, others not. I could not recognize an obvious regularity behind this behaviour which, by the way, also occurs under MS Windows when accessing the online edition with browsers such as MS Internet Explorer (6.0) or Mozilla (Firebird 0.6.1)In the case of Safari, it may be due to the fact that the browser attempts to read some Baskerville MT characters as Unicode, even though this is not a Unicode font. Basing Baskerville MT on Unicode, with proper Unicode indexes, should remove this problem. The problem with Camino is different. Camino renders the
tags as returns, resulting in a line break after every word containing special diacritics. I know too little of HTML and even less of JavaScript to be able to pin down the syntax errors in the code. But when I checked the code using BBEdit, it complained, i.a., that "Element requires that the attribute 'action' be specified" -- an error that probably explains the display problems in Camino. These limitations may in part be due to Brill's apparent use of Verity's CD Web Publisher software to produce this CD-ROM (http://www.verity.com/products/publisher/index.html). I would imagine that it should not take too much additional effort to clean up the resulting code and make it more standards-compliant. This should result in both CD-ROM and online versions of the EI that are fully usable under OS 8/9 as well as OS X, giving users free choice of what browser they prefer, instead of limiting them to a single one the development of which has been arrested. Under OS 9, MS Internet Explorer is the only browser that will run the EI-CD. For the online version, Explorer behaves exactly under OS 9 as under OS X. I have not tested the online version with other OS 9 browsers. Other glitches Otherwise, the main issue from a user's point of view is that hyperlinks work only inconsistently. Links have apparently been automatically produced using computer software, so all entries are much more heavily strewn with hyperlinks than there are cross-references in the printed version. This automatic creation probably also accounts for the facts that some cross-references are not living hyperlinks themselves. There are two types of links -- HTML and JavaScript. HTML links will open the target in the same frame as the original text. JavaScript links are designed to run a search on the highlighted term in the background, opening the results in the "Results" frame to the left. It is not transparent according to what criteria one or the other form of linking is employed. This issue is of course one that is not specific to the Macintosh version, but will be found in the Windows and online versions as well. On the Mac, links containing diacritics do not work in the online version if one uses MS Internet Explorer. Explorer has no problems with such links in the CD version, and online links work fine in Safari and in Camino... Greek text is rendered in Brill's "KadmosNieuw" font, also installed onto the system during initial setup. In both Internet Explorer and in Camino, however, accented Greek characters are not correctly displayed. Interestingly, Safari does not suffer this problem. Greek text copied from Safari and pasted into MS Word, however, ends up just the same as it is displayed under Explorer/Camino. The reason behind this probably lies in the different ways of encoding used on the various systems, and the implementation of lack of of Unicode, but again I am no expert in this issue and therefore limit myself here to pointing out the end effect noticeable to the user. In the Search pane, clicking the "Search" button after selecting the "Hits" radio button does not work in MS Internet Explorer. You can still search by hitting return in any of the two Search Text fields. Safari and Camino do not exhibit this problem. Summary The Macintosh version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam CD-ROM is a very welcome addition to our library, and I would not want to miss it even though I have the printed volumes on my shelf. Both will continue to live side by side, as both paper and CD have their specific advantages, such as readability vs. searchability. The Macintosh version of the CD does what it promises to do. It offers full electronic access to the EI for users of OS 9 or Classic and MS Internet Explorer, and that is fair enough. As development continues, however, I do hope that the next edition of the CD irons out the glitches described above and provides a more widely accessible and standards-compliant interface. It shouldn't be too hard to do. Albrecht Hofheinz Centre for Modern Oriental Studies Berlin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- End of Arabic-L: 08 Sep 2003