[Biblical-languages] Diff. in Unicode handling of Gk vs. Heb?

biblang at ntresources.com biblang at ntresources.com
Fri Oct 10 10:27:39 EDT 2003


I'm preparing/revising a presentation for a seminar on Unicode for our PhD
students. Last time I did this I covered only NT/Greek use. This time around
I'm expanding it to cover Hebrew as well (partly because I've been working
the last month or so on adding Hebrew support to the Unicode version of my
Galilee font--which is coming one of these days!). So that I represent these
matters accurately, I'd appreciate any help on these questions:

1. *Why* is Hebrew handled differently in Unicode than the recommended way
of doing Greek? That is (if I understand things correctly), the recommended
way to do Greek is to use precomposed forms for letters with diacritics (the
Greek Extended range), but Unicode does not provide such a range of
precomposed characters for Hebrew, using over-striking characters instead.

2. What is the correct terminology to describe these differences? (Does this
relate to "normalization forms" or is "precomposed"/"decomposed" the correct
way to describe the difference?)

3. Is it correct to assume that the most common way to handle the proper
positioning of Hebrew points, etc. is through the use of OpenType layout
capabilities? (Are there other ways of doing this in addition to Graphite
and AAT?)

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 
Rodney J. Decker, Th.D., Assoc. Professor/NT
Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, PA, USA
URL: www.NTResources.com  
PURL: purl.oclc.org/NT_Resources/
Email: <rdecker> at <NTResources.com>
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 


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