Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel C. Salomon" <joelcsalomon AT gmail.com>]

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