Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Polycarp66 AT aol.com]

In a message dated 3/28/2003 10:44:02 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
susan AT read-the-bible.org writes:

> I'm trying to EMail with a friend in Israel whose computer evidently came 
> with Arial &Times New Romans Hebrew fonts.  My computer in the US has a 
> number of Arial &Times New Romans fonts, but none of them are Hebrew.  Any 
> idea how I can get the fonts my friend has, so we can EMail Hebrew text to 
> one another?  My computer came from Gateway, who says they don't have such 
> fonts to send me...  I also checked the MicroSoft site, but got 
> nowhere.  There's a Penn State web page at 
> http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/hebrew.html
> that says, for Windows NT/2000/XP (which I have):  "Hebrew Fonts - Modern 
> versions of Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma, Courier New, and Arial Unicode 
> include Hebrew characters. Lucida Sans Unicode, David, and Miriam will also 
> 
> work.
> Most of these fonts are available through Windows."
> 

When I enter Hebrew in web pages, I format it with the standard Times New 
Roman font that comes with Windows.  You are dealing with a unicode font.  
Unless you have a unicode word processor such as Unitype GlobalWriter 
(www.unitype.com), you will need to use the insert symbol function in MS Word 
to enter Hebrew characters.  Unicode is unlike the standard ASCII characters. 
 They only cover 255 different characters so you need to switch fonts to 
enter a language which doesn't use Latin-based characters.  In unicode each 
language has its own series of characters which differ from all others.

gfsomsel
>From peterkirk AT ozemail.com.au  Sun Mar 30 01:27:09 2003
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From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT ozemail.com.au>
To: "'JAMES CROWLEY KIRK'" <jkirk AT wisc.edu>
Subject: RE: RE: [b-hebrew] Arial & Times New Roman fonts
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 16:23:20 +1000
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Hi, Jim. Any relation? My ancestors are from Chapel-en-le-Frith, =
Derbyshire
in northern England.

The best solution to your problem would be to get Ezra SIL installed on =
the
university's computers. I guess you have good reason if this is part of =
your
studies. If you are talking about Word documents, you can set up your
computer to embed the font in the document (under Tools - Options - Save =
in
Word 2002), which means that the font is temporarily installed when the
document is opened and so probably prints OK. This is the next best
solution.

It sounds like when your documents are opened the university computers =
are
substituting a font (using the same code points as these are all Unicode
fonts, it's only the character shapes which are bad or not what you =
like),
and not making the best choice. Maybe they are substituting Arial or =
Miriam.
So, as a third alternative, try changing the font to David, or to Times =
New
Roman. They should give reasonable results with uncantillated text, =
though
TNR has some problems with holem.

Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
=20

> -----Original Message-----
> From: JAMES CROWLEY KIRK [mailto:jkirk AT wisc.edu]
> Sent: 30 March 2003 02:16
> To: Peter Kirk
> Cc: 'b-hebrew list'
> Subject: Re: RE: [b-hebrew] Arial & Times New Roman fonts
>=20
> Hello,
>=20
> As long as the topic of Hebrew fonts has come up I was wondering if =
Peter
> or someone else might be willing to continue the discussion briefly =
for me
> (btw, hello, my name's Jim; I'm a grad student at UW-Madison).
>=20
> I recently set up my personal computer with the unicode Ezra SIL font,
> hoping that I would be able to open Hebrew documents in university
> computer labs, that otherwise have only the standard Microsoft hebrew
> fonts (and print them on their nice laser printers).  I like the SIL =
fonts
> because I find the Keyman program that they run with makes it so easy =
to
> type in Hebrew or transcription.  But when I opened a consonantal-only
> text on a computer that did not already have Ezra SIL, Hebrew =
characters
> showed up but they didn't look half as good as Ezra SIL--only the bare
> outline of each character is represented (they look like =
"ascii-hebrew").
>=20
> Given that this font is supposed to be in a "universal"-code I would =
think
> that it would show up the same on any newer software.  Perhaps the =
problem
> is that my personal computer runs a newer version of Microsoft Word =
than
> the computer labs (which run Word 2000), but again it's confusing to =
me
> that I do get Hebrew characters that don't look like Ezra SIL.
>=20
> Any insights for me into the mysteries of the fonts?
>=20
> Thank you,
> Jim
>=20