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i have something i want to do that i have in mind but not sure which language would be best to do it in. i am in the beginning stages of researching what i'll need to do in order to accomplish my task. what i want to do is a word processing program (ei: ms word) that will basically convert the english alphabet, as its keyed into a new file & convert it to ancient text (ei: ancient hebrew not the modern) while being displayed on the screen. i'll have to write or draw the ancient letters of the alphabet bc i find hardly any on the net. did all that make sense?!

You will probably have trouble with this. Different alphabets have different numbers of letters. Something like ancient Hebrew is even more difficult because they didn't originally write vowels: all of the letters are consonants. Later they added vowel points to indicate vowel sound, but these are relatively small marks that modify the consonants, not full letters. According to the Hebrew dictionary in Strong's Concordance, there are 22 consonants and 13 vowel points. The number of possible letters, consonants with vowel points, is probably going to be more than you can handle with a keyboard.

:-? ok.

I suggest that you create your own True-type font. It could be used similar to the Tengwar fonts (JRR Tolkien, LotR style) as they have only consonant characters, and diacritic marks for vowles
e.g.

is "hello world" but in ASCII (the actual characters I had to type in MS word to get it was: 9j$;`N y6Yj2)
I've thought about creating a program that turns regular text into Tengwar compatable ASCII, but I haven't been bothered yet

Don't be down-hearted heavenraiza, as you don't have to create a glyph for each combination of consonant+vowel, the vowles have a negative padding so when typed after a constant they appear attached/above/below/... the previous constant.

the font used in the pic is available @ http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/4948/index.html

There's also that whole "Arabic" alphabet, it having the same derivation as Hebrew, & it's sort of used in real life

now are you trying to translate phonetic sounds into Hebrew, like names and stuff? I'd suggest looking up the proper unicode character set, and translating it into a text file. Then a Hebrew font should be able to view it.

I'm not sure it ancient Hebrew has a character set, but most languages, even dead ones, have character sets.

Arial.

http://hebrewresources.com/images/Ancient_Hebrew.jpg

counting from the left, its the second column. thats what i want to do. theres only 22 letters. 2 different sounds ah & i. the first column gives me a clue on what letters from the keyboard to associate w/for the letters in the ancient hebrew.

Well, you can do this in QB using SCREEN 12 or whatever and drawing a custom font. But the easiest way is using Truetype and a RTF box in Visual Basic.

thanx na_th_an. ima start vb class in approx 1 1/2 weeks but til then i'll search what i can do w/this in qb.

I'm glad it looks like it will work out for you. Sorry if I discouraged you unnecessarily.