Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

On Friday 14 January 2005 17:51, Peter Kirk wrote:
> On 14/01/2005 23:27, DJNordlund AT aol.com wrote:
> > <>
> > ...
> >
> > No, when using unicode fonts it is not necessary to have "the correct"
> > font
> > installed. That is the benefit of unicode. All you need is some unicode
> > font that supports the language you are interested in. Unicode fonts
> > like MS
> > Arial Unicode, and Palatino Linotype support (at least) English,
> > polytonic
> > Greek, and Hebrew. Those fonts can appropriately render Hebrew or
> > Greek text
> > that is written using those fonts, or any other unicode fonts, such as
> > SIL EZRA
> > unicode or Cyberbit Basic, etc., as long as UTF-8 encoding is used to
> > send
> > the text (as pointed out by Peter Kirk).
>
> Actually you don't need any of these special fonts to read Unicode
> Hebrew. At least on Windows XP and 2000, I think also on Windows 98 with
> Internet Explorer 5 or later, the system standard fonts Times New Roman,
> Arial and Courier New support legible Hebrew. You will just get the
> following problems:
>
> 1) The holam dot is wrongly shown as a spacing character;
> 2) No support for accents/cantillation marks (you will see square boxes
> instead);
> 3) The text may be very small, as Dave noted;
> 4) The fixed spacing Courier New, often the default for plain text
> e-mail, looks very ugly in Hebrew.
>
> For better looking results, use Ezra SIL (not SIL Ezra which is not
> Unicode), SBL Hebrew etc.

I just installed it on my Linux machine, and the Hebrew Peter sent looks 
great.  Vowels in the right places, the whole nine yards.  It was a little 
small, as I said before, but I just bumped up the overall font size by a 
point and it was fine.  Good font!

-- 
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"No good.  Hit on head."   -Gronk