Hill Museum & Manuscript Library

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Important Links How to obtain manuscript copies Information for visiting scholars Malta Study Center Ethiopia Study Center Austria-Germany Study Center Printed Books at HMML, Saint John's University, and College of Saint Benedict List of Incunabula at Saint John's University HMML's publications about its collections In Principio (Latin manuscripts) eBeth Arké Syriac Studies Collection Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project (EMIP) collection of Ehiopian manuscripts and magic scrolls Information on EAMMS (Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts) Current Digitization Projects Browser setup for using this website	The HMML website makes use of a number of advanced Web technologies to deliver its content. Among them: Cascading Style Sheets Increasingly, web pages use cascading style sheets (CSS) to set the look and feel of web content. Older browsers, such as Netscape 4.x, do not support CSS and will not display such pages properly, if at all. Unicode: Many of the names and terms used in the catalogue contain text characters that are outside the "Western" Latin 1 character set. Transliterated Semitic languages require special characters not contained in many readily available computer fonts. To properly deliver such text, HMML uses Unicode, a worldwide text-encoding standard that assigns unique code points to thousands of text characters, eliminating the need for separate code pages for different languages. In order to view these special characters, the user's computer must have a font installed that contains glyphs for these codepoints. You can test your browser setup here. HMML has tested its website with a number of different browser configurations and can recommend the following: Windows PC Computers Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7.x is the recommended browser. Under the "view" menu, scroll down to the section marked "Encoding" and select the Unicode (UTF-8) setting. Set the default font to Arial Unicode MS, a font that contains glyphs for thousands of non-Western Latin characters, as well as script characters for such languages as Arabic and Armenian. Arial Unicode MS is available on Windows XP and is installed as part of Office 2000 and newer. Firefox, the open-source browser from the creators of Netscape, also works with HMML's site. Macintosh OS X Thorough testing has been done with various web browsers running on Macintosh's OS X. Overall, Mozilla Firefox have proven the most compatible with HMML's use of special transliteration characters and non-Latin scripts. Safari, Apple's default browser, has some minor problems in rendering certain Arabic characters. OS X ships with a system font called Lucida Grande that contains the necessary Unicode figures to properly render Latin transliteration characters. OS X can dynamically swap non-Latin characters from other installed fonts to render Arabic and other native scripts. Internet Explorer for OS X is not recommended, as it doesn't support Unicode. Macintosh OS 9.x Older Macintosh computers seem to work with Latin transliteration characters if the latest version of Netscape (version 7.x) is used, even though Netscape 7.0 fails our browser test! Somehow, the system is able to swap the correct characters into the pages. If you know why this works, please let us know! Older Netscape versions don't support cascading style sheets, causing elements to be misaligned and unformatted. Internet Explorer won't properly display text characters outside of Latin 1, substituting question marks or breaking up text and diacriticals. Linux/Unix HMML has tested its website on a few Linux installations with good results. Mozilla, the open-source version of Netscape, has worked on Linux and would be a good starting point for choosing a browser for this platform. We welcome feedback from folks using browsers on these platforms.