Display and Fonts

Display and Fonts

This page has information of the BAS encoding itself, on how to toggle between Regular and ALA display modes, and on how to set up your browser to use the BAS encoding and AlaBas fonts.

The BAS encoding

The ALA-LC/ ANSEL encoding used by the BAS database specifies all characters and diacritics used by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress for the description of bibliographic items. Its purpose is correct character interchange, not optimal visual display: each diacritic is encoded only once, and differences in the height and width of the following modified characters are ignored.

The BAS has licensed an ALA-LC font from Ecological Linguistics, PO Box 15156, Washington, DC, 20003, a commercial vendor of computer fonts for transliteration and non-Roman scripts. You can download this licensed font for free for use with the BAS database in a Windows or Macintosh environment. The BAS Editors strongly urge you to do so for optimal scholarly benefit.

There is a document in pdf format available for download with more explanations on the individual characters, signs and diacritics in the fonts.

Regular and ALA Display Modes

You can choose to display entries in two character display modes, Regular and ALA. The default display is Regular Display, 7-bit ASCII only, without any diacritics. You can always return to this mode by clicking the Regular Display button on any screen where it is available. Use this option if you do not wish to install the special AlaBas font.

If you wish to correctly display the full available set of diacritical marks in the BAS data, you will first need to download the ALA-LC encoded font, then install the font on your computer, and finally designate this font as your display font, and use the ALA Display mode. To access this mode, click on the ALA Display button on any result screen where it is available. Some pages are only available as Regular Display.

Registering and choosing the AlaBas font in your browser

After installing your font, register AlaBas as your default variable-width display font for the User defined encoding option in the fonts preferences settings of your web browser.

For example, in Netscape 4.7, select "Preferences" from the Edit menu, then click the "Appearance/Fonts" option; select "User-Defined" in the encoding pop-up menu, and then select AlaBas for the variable width font. Choosing this registration option enables you to easily return to your previously chosen preferred fonts for other non-BAS Western pages.

In Internet Explorer 5.5 choose "Internet Options" from the "Tools" menu, click on the "Fonts" button, choose "User defined" from the "Language script" pop-up menu, and choose AlaBas as the Web Page font.

Once you have specified the AlaBas font as the font to use for the "User-Defined" encoding, you can display your BAS pages with this font simply by choosing the "User-Defined" option from the character set submenu, available from the View menu (Netscape), or the encoding submenu from the View menu (Internet Explorer). To actually see diacritics, make sure you view pages in the ALA Display mode. Note that depending on the browser, in some situations the floating diacritic will appear before the base character instead of on top of it. This is a browser bug which does not influence correct display in other environments (e.g., a text document.)

Note: In the bookbag window, currently changing the encoding option is currently only available to Internet Explorer users on Windows, by using the right-click button.

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