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

Peter Kirk peterkirk at qaya.org
Fri Oct 10 08:18:25 EDT 2003


On 10/10/2003 06:27, biblang at ntresources.com wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I think this is a bit of a historical accident. The normal Unicode way 
is to use base characters and combining diacritics. But for backward 
compatibility Unicode also incorporated existing standards including the 
one with a full set of Greek precomposed characters. Because the full 
set is there, it is convenient to use, and so becomes the recommendation 
at least for web use. There is actually a  very partial set of Hebrew 
precomposed characters, under "Alphabetic Presentation Forms", but these 
should NOT be used for coding of texts. They are not recommended perhaps 
partly because they are so incomplete. The full set of precomposed 
characters for Hebrew would be many thousands, including accent 
combinations.

>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?)
>  
>
You might like to look through parts of the Unicode standard itself, 
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/, to make sure you are 
using the right terminology.

>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?)
>  
>
The only fonts I know which attempt to do this properly use OpenType. 
Graphite and AAT could also do it, and there are a few other similar 
technologies.


-- 
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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