Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06peterson AT cua.edu>]

Clayton Javurek wrote:
> Clayton Javurek
> E-MAIL: javurek AT asu.edu
>
> Is there any website out there where one can view
> the entire Hebrew OT text without any fonts
> required? A fontless website?

It doesn't seem like it would be terribly interesting, since without any 
fonts you wouldn't be able to see anything :-)

I presume, though, that you mean a Web site where you can use any font 
you like. For the most part, that would only be possible with a 
transliteration like the old OTA text, on which this one is based. It's 
a precise transliteration system, but horrible to read IMHO. For that, 
you could use any font capable of representing the basic ASCII 
characters. For a Unicode text, there are a few basic elements that are 
necessary. One is a Unicode-capable system. Most current versions of 
Windows satisfy this requirement, and the more recent releases of any of 
the major Web browsers should be able to display it. In a Windows 
system, Uniscribe is the rendering application, which has gone through 
several revisions but can be hard to update, because it's not readily 
available except as a component in various software packages. (The most 
recent version of MS-Office would do it, and I guess there are a couple 
of other apps that include it.) Finally, you need a font capable of 
displaying Unicode characters, particularly the characters in which 
you're interested. There are a few publicly available fonts that try to 
render a lot of what Unicode has to offer (although I suspect that most 
of them don't include Chinese, for instance), but sometimes you're 
better off looking for a specialized font that targets a particular 
character set. The two mentioned in this thread are currently about the 
best freely available fonts for rendering Unicode Hebrew. If all you 
want is the consonantal text, it probably doesn't make much difference. 
If you want full voweling and/or accenting, you really want a good 
Hebrew font like Ezra or SBL Hebrew. A Unicode Hebrew text should work 
in any Unicode font that includes the Hebrew characters. But it will 
look pretty ugly in many of them.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics