Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter.r.kirk AT ntlworld.com>]

On 17/07/2003 16:16, Karl Randolph wrote:

> Actually, I have something similar on my Macintosh at home. I downloaded the 
> Online Bible consonant only text and made a quick reconstruction of a paleo 
> Hebrew font to fit it. It looks sort of like what such a manuscript may have 
> looked like: the sin and shin look the same and the sofit glyphs are the same 
> as the non-sofit glyphs, but the underlying code is still modern.
>
> As far as I know, the Online Bible is the only version that has the option of 
> a consonant only text, at least for the Macintosh. The main thing keeping me 
> from taking that text and re-encoding it in paleo-Hebrew is that there is no 
> such encoding in unicode yet.
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>
>  
Well, it's debatable in Unicode whether paleo-Hebrew should be 
considered a variety of Phoenician which will (see 
http://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/) probably sometime be encoded in 
the block 00010930-0001094F  (and it's pretty certain that in that case 
the order of characters will be very like the proposal 
http://www.evertype.com/standards/plane-1/ph.html), or whether it is 
considered a variety of Hebrew in which case the paleo-Hebrew letters 
are considered glyph variants of the modern Hebrew ones. The latter is 
certainly the safer choice at present. Perhaps you can get together with 
Jim West to re-encode his paleo-Hebrew font, see 
http://web.infoave.net/~jwest/fonts.html, with the appropriate Unicode 
encoding. If you simply assign zero width blank glyphs to all the 
vowels, cantillation marks etc, any Unicode Hebrew text (e.g. the 
cantillated Bible text from http://www.mechon-mamre.org/) will 
automatically come out how you want it. You may even become the first 
person for more than 2000 years to actually read the Bible in this 
script. Exciting, but I'm not sure how practical.

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