Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I downloaded the shareware (not public domain) version of these fonts, from
www.silvermnt.com (thank you, Naama, for this URL), and with considerable
difficulty installed them, then decided I was wasting my time. The package
consists of one Greek and one Hebrew font, both encoded as transliterations,
and a help file. The Hebrew font, which is dated 1993!, contains only a few
marks which are perhaps intended as cantillation marks, so this cannot be
the font used for the (allegedly) fully cantillated text in Bible Windows.
The help file does offer an upgraded "commercial version" for $49, including
the RHebrew font. So whereas RHebrew may be useful for displaying the
cantillated text (at a price), SHebrew is not.

The help file states that RHebrew uses the same keyboard layout as SHebrew.
This is a transliterated layout in which e.g. d is used for dalet, D is used
for dalet with dagesh. That is why the Office 2000 got confused when you
tried to tag this text as Hebrew. To Office, it is not proper Hebrew but
transliterated Hebrew with an odd set of characters. You should set the
language to "unknown", or "English", certainly nothing right-to-left. But
Office 2000 will always be confused by these older fonts which used
non-standard character encodings - Office tries to convert these to Unicode
and makes assumptions about what types of character they are (letter,
punctuation, accent etc) based on the encoding, and these assumptions are
not correct if the font is non-standard. The moral: move to Unicode as
quickly as possible - but you will need to wait a little for a Unicode font
for fully pointed Hebrew.

Peter Kirk

-----Original Message-----
From: Melvin Ely and Naama Zahavi-Ely [mailto:nxzaha AT wm.edu]
Sent: 17 November 2000 16:59
To: Biblical Hebrew
Subject: Hebrew font with vowel points and cantillation marks


I use the RHebrew font from Silver Mountain Software, together with their
Bible software (Bible Windows).  I can cut and paste from it into Word (I
used Word 97 and am now using Word/Office 2000).  I am using Windows 98
(standard English version).  It works fine, both on my computer and on our
computer lab at the university (College of William and Mary).

The trick is -- when I try to add in Office support for Hebrew (which is
"not supported by the system") in the Microsoft Office Language Setting, it
throws the font off -- the nikud shows up in the wrong place.  When I delete
the (partial) support for Hebrew in Office, and just treat the characters as
English, they work perfectly (and look beautiful).  For me, this font is
indispensable -- I teach my students to use cantillation marks to break the
text down into (much) smaller units, and this has greatly decreased the
number of completely-garbled translations that I get.

A similar but less good-looking font by Silver Mountain is public domain:
SHebrew.  It also has both vowel marks and cantillation marks.

Best wishes,

Naama Zahavi-Ely




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