Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Peter Kirk" <Peter_Kirk AT sil.org>]

Unicode does standardise things, rigorously so - which means that (in the
encoding) vowels must be AFTER the consonant. If this TITUS font works
correctly the other way round, it is not conformant to Unicode.

The problem is simply that there are (as far as I know) no Unicode fonts
currently available which support pointed Hebrew properly. TNR and Arial
certainly do not. David seems to do quite well, so does Miriam I think. But
the holem is a special problem because it has to be in a different place
over a lamed. Microsoft's new Uniscribe technology does allow such a proper
Hebrew font to be made, and I understand that Microsoft is working on such a
font, planning to release it with the next version of Office. SIL may also
produce such a font.

For now, probably the best you can do is to use David or Miriam. Or maybe
there are alternatives available in Israel. Can anyone give more
information? What we want is any font which properly displays Hebrew with
vowel points with Windows 95/98 and Word 97/2000.

Peter Kirk

-----Original Message-----
From: John Richards [mailto:jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk]
Sent: 16 November 2000 07:22
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Hebrew Unicode


I see that the Cholem vowel sign under Times New Roman with Hebrew Unicode
leaves a gap as if for a character - even if one puts it in front of the
character it goes with. Does anyone know how to stop this - presuming that
it can be stopped?

The same is true with Arial, but not David or TITUS Cyberbit Basic. At the
same time, TNR expects vowels to be written AFTER the consonant, while TITUS
Cyberbit Basic expects them to be placed BEFORE the consonant (for them to
be properly positioned). I thought Unicode was meant to standardise things!

John Richards