Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Efraim Feinstein <efraim.feinstein AT gmail.com>]

Greetings list,

(This message is more concerned with a technical aspect of encoding 
Biblical Hebrew, rather than any feature of the language itself.  If 
this is the wrong list to post, I apologize; Please inform me and I'll 
try to find a more appropriate forum.)

The Open Siddur Project is encoding the Jewish prayer book (siddur) in 
Unicode text+XML semantic markup.  Much of the siddur is Biblical Hebrew 
text or written in Biblical or quasi-Biblical Hebrew.  Contemporary 
careful printings of the siddur, like some contemporary printings of the 
bible, typographically differentiate between the sheva na and the sheva 
nach. 

Unfortunately, Unicode only includes one sheva character. I Googled and 
found some discussions from back in 2003 on b-hebrew and on Unicode-ML 
on these issues, and it seemed that there was nothing resembling a 
consensus back then, and the relevant Unicode committees were reluctant 
to add a new character.   As far as I can tell, that state hasn't 
changed up to and including the not-yet-released Unicode 5.2.

Does anyone on this list encode text that differentiates between the two 
characters?  Are there any quasi-standard ways to encode a difference 
(say, in the Unicode Private Use Area)?  If so, how widespread is the 
font support?

Thanks,

Efraim Feinstein
Lead Developer
Jewish Liturgy/Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.net
http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org