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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] State of the art for encoding the sheva-na?

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  • From: "Joel C. Salomon" <joelcsalomon AT gmail.com>
  • To: Efraim Feinstein <efraim.feinstein AT gmail.com>, Biblical Hebrew list <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] State of the art for encoding the sheva-na?
  • Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:36:22 -0400

Efraim Feinstein wrote:
> 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.

As you said, Unicode only has the one sheva character; I know of no
common extensions to that.

A better place to ask might be the Typophile forums, especially the
Hebrew typography section at <http://typophile.com/forum/373>. There’s
even a fellow there with a font that automatically detects sheva na/nach
and qamats qatan!

—Joel Salomon




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