Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Matthew, I can go slightly better than you though I'm not trying for
one-upmanship or anything. I have another Hebrew OpenType font, Guttman
David, and I have the complete text of the Hebrew Bible WITH
cantillations/accents. Most things display correctly, but there are a few
problems, especially with the double cantillation of the Ten Commandments.
I'm sure an OpenType font could be set up to correct these, but it will be a
lot of work to fix all of these potential problems. By the way, I got all of
these as an alpha tester of a new version of Paratext, a program from UBS
for displaying parallel texts which is unfortunately available for
translators only.

How does your version display Y:RUW$FLAIM? What about Y:RUW$ALA:MFH (1KI
10:2; 2KI 9:28; ISA 36:2; EZK 8:3)? And what about MIT.FAXAT (EXO 20:4),
with double vowel on one consonant? The display may not be quite as perfect
as you think.

Patrick, this should answer your question as well.

Peter Kirk

> -----Original Message-----
> From: M & E Anstey [mailto:anstey AT raketnet.nl]
> Sent: 26 October 2001 10:51
> To: Biblical Hebrew
> Subject: Re: Hebrew Translation and fonts
>
>
> Dear Trudy et al,
>
> The issues of Hebrew fonts on and off the web, and unicode are enourmously
> complex. The reason that many people have (limited) success with
> displaying
> Hebrew on their windows system is due to Uniscribe, which is a dll
> (usp10.dll) in the windows\system directory that gives instructions to
> windows programs as to how to arrange some of the Hebrew characters in the
> Hebrew unicode region. This is still however a problem, as
> Uniscribe does a
> fairly poor job at the moment. The best long term solution is open type.
> There is only one open type Hebrew font that I know of, Guttman Vilna, and
> it is only available at the moment legally, as far as I know, with Office
> XP. Open Type fonts are fonts that carry detailed instructions for how to
> render combinations of glyphs, which is what is needed for Hebrew
> (mind you,
> other languages are much more complex than Hebrew).
>
> The best thing about open type fonts, is that anyone is free to make their
> own. TO do this, and it is not simple, you need to subscribe to the VOLT
> community with miscrosoft, and downloand their software. If you
> do this, and
> get Guttman Vilna (you will have to work out a legal way to do this!), and
> load it in, you will see how open type fonts work. They are really neat.
>
> I have the complete OT in unicode, without accents, and it displays
> perfectly in Guttman Vilna in HTML in IE 5 and above. IE 5.5 and above
> (maybe earlier IE as well) handles the font directions
> beautifuilly as well.
> So you can enter in logical order the Hebrew, followed by and
> English word,
> followed by Hebrew ,etc, and it will reverse the order of the
> Hebrew but not
> the English. The whole sentence will also wrap right-to-left, etc, etc.
>
> Hope this is of some help. This is just the tip of the iceberg of this
> issue.
>
> regards
>
>
> Matthew Anstey
> ------------------------------------------
> Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
> Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid
> "Werkgroep Informatica"
> anstey AT raketnet.nl