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Add New Fonts to the VTBE

At SWBTS, we created a special language pack that enables faculty and students to integrate Greek into their Blackboard courses. For example, instructors can display Greek paradigms on lesson pages and integrate Greek phrases and sentences into exam questions. Students can integrate Greek into exam answers and Discussion Board posts.

This discussion assumes that you are familiar with Blackboard's language pack feature. Blackboard provides a very good introduction in their manual Blackboard Learn: Release 9.1 Working with Language Packs (available at the Behind the Blackboard site). This discussion supplements this manual.

What we did
We use the BibleWorks Greek and Hebrew fonts on our campus. Students who do not own the BibleWorks software can download these free fonts from the Internet. Instructors on our campus wanted to integrate these fonts into Blackboard pages, exam questions, and Discussion Board posts.

To provide a solution, we created a new language pack. In this new pack, we replaced several fonts in the VTBE (Visual Textbox Editor) with the BibleWorks language fonts. Now users can choose one of several Biblical language options (see screenshot below).

How to do it
Log into Blackboard at the administrator level. Navigate to the Admin panel -> Language Packs (under Tools and Utilities)-> the language pack that your institution is using.

DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP: Before you make any changes, you must first make a copy of the original language pack and then make all modifications to the copy. Finally, make the copy the default language pack or an optional pack among others. Don't make changes to the original (see below). You will find directions for making copies in the manual Blackboard Learn: Release 9.1 Working with Language Packs (available at the Behind the Blackboard site).

For example, we based our new language pack on the U.S. English pack (en_US). We made a copy of this pack and named it en_US_BibLang. (See Blackboard's language pack manual regarding naming schemes). The new language pack's display name (as it appears to users) is English (Biblical Languages).

After you have made a copy of the original language pack, open the copy for editing.

Agree to the licensing terms and click the Submit button.

Now find the js_wysiwyg.properties file and open it for editing. There are two sections in this file that you will need to edit. This is how they are labeled:

• # Displayed font names
• # Underlying client system font names for the above fonts

The Displayed Font Names are the names that users see in the VTBE's drop-down font menu. In the image below, notice that we replaced default font names with new Greek and Hebrew fonts. For example, we replaced Book Antiqua with BibleWorks Greek.

Now scroll down to the next section: Underlying client system font names for the above fonts. For this section, you will need to know the underlying names of the fonts, i.e., the names that will be recognized by client systems. In the case of the Biblical language fonts in our example, the underlying font names are:

• bwgrkl
• bwgrki
• bwhebb

To find the underlying font name, look in your computer's font folder.

In the image below, notice that we have replaced the original underlying font names with the names of our Biblical language fonts.

After you make your changes to the js_wysiwyg.properties page, scroll down and click the Submit button.

Of course, instructors and students will need the fonts installed on their computers in order to see the fonts correctly displayed in a Blackboard course. At SWBTS, we just direct students to the BibleWorks web site, where the fonts can be downloaded for free. We also provide instructions to faculty and students for using the modified VTBE. As an example, here is a help page that we created for our faculty.

IMPORTANT REMINDER: The Blackboard language pack documentation strongly advises users to NOT alter the original language pack. This can result in unwanted system issues. Instead, follow these steps:

1. Create a copy of the language pack (you will find directions for this in the manual Blackboard Learn: Release 9.1 Working with Language Packs (available at the Behind the Blackboard site).
2. Modify the copy.
3. Make the modified copy the default language pack or an optional pack among others.

One other thing: You and your students must use the Safari or Firefox web browser to type special fonts into the Blackboard 9x VTBE. You cannot use Microsoft Internet Explorer as of this writing (August 18, 2010). IE generates an underlying code that fails to display fonts in all browsers. (It generates a font tag with a 'face' attribute that is not recognized by the Blackboard web page's strict DOCTYPE setting in all browsers.) This is an issue that we isolated here at SWBTS when we upgraded to 9.1. Blackboard has confirmed that it is a problem with their software and have escalated it as an issue to be fixed in a future service pack.

Let me know if this was helpful. I'd also like to learn from you about new ways to modify the VTBE or new fonts that your institution has adopted.

You can email me at:
wdewysockie@swbts.edu

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