Frequently Asked Questions & Help
How can I input transcript characters or Arabic script?
For the website, we provide a small link showing a keyboard symbol (⌨) next to each eligible input field. Clicking it will provide you with a helpful onscreen keyboard.
Of course, if you already have an input solution on your computer, for example the Arabic keyboard layout or a customized set of hotkeys, you can use that as well.
What is the difference between Quick Search and the Search function?
The Quick Search bar, located at the upper left of the website, provides a quick’n dirty method to search the glossary: You can enter one search term and get all entries as results that contain your search term in the Latin lemma or the Arabic expression or its root.
The Search function, reachable via the menu bar underneath the title, allows you to enter up to four search terms: Latin lemma, Arabic expression, English translation, and Arabic root. The checkbox ‘Search in quotes’ can be used to expand the Latin and Arabic search terms’ scope to include the respective quotations. The results will be all entries that contain each search term at least once. It is a logical ‘and’ search.
The Search function therefore is a much more granular tool, suited for concise selection of results, whereas the Quick Search function should do well enough for most cases of just wanting to look up a word.
What are the requirements for browsing the Arabic and Latin Glossary website?
Being a multilingual project, the website requires support for Unicode UTF-8 character encoding. UTF-8 is both recommended by the W3C as the default encoding for content on the web, and has been the most widely used character encoding online for quite a while. Support on every browsing solution is virtually assured.
Furthermore, the site greatly profits from standards-compliancy for HTML5. With the W3C spec reaching recommendation status in October 2014, its quite good backwards compatibility for legacy browsers, and support firmly established among the common desktop browsers, we feel it is a safe standard to use. We did our best to avoid potentially tricky or partially supported CSS 3.0 features. (A notable exception: we did choose to employ the CSS 3.0 flexible box module – a W3C last call working draft as of May 2015 – that is only partially supported by the now-current version 11 of Microsoft Internet Explorer.) Activated Javascript is required for providing assistance with the input of transcript and Arabic letters.
Any reasonably recent version of the prevalent browser software products should be able to handle the website.