Notes from Limmud 2007: Saudi Arabia: Kingdom on the Rebound

( Grumpyolddog responded to my last Limmud notes post with 'This stuff is always fascinating, but *insert tongue firmly into cheek* your subject matter is almost always exactly the same! Let's have a nice story about Vikings or early Chung Kuo for a change!' So here's a talk that has nothing to do with Jews or Judaism or Jewish history or Israel. :o) )

Hebrew fonts

My plan to create my own Friday night siddur is coming along apace—already, I've managed to collect the entirety of the Hebrew texts off the Web (though I did have to manually convert Wikipedia's text for יְדִיד נֶפֶשׁ from the Sephardi (and, according to Wikipedia, original wording). I've also been having fun putting in bits of commentary—interesting things I've discovered about the service, which I haven't seen in standard siddur commentaries.

It's not been without hitches, though. Micros~1 Word is struggling to cope with such a thoroughly bidirectional text. I've set the whole document to run right to left, and now the English is not appearing right, with such oddities as full stops appearing at the left of the line they're on; and sometimes a line with two sentence halves on it ordering them the right way.

Moreover, I'm having font problems. Windows does not typeset the vowel חוֹלָם properly; it creates an unwanted space between it and the surrounding letters. I can get around this where it's combined with ו by using the precomposed form וֹ, but obviously this doesn't completely solve the problem. Is it just the version of Windows I use at work that does this, or have other people seen this too?

One alternative would be to desert Windows for Open Office running on Fedora Linux at home—but that brings its own problems. Firstly the default font it uses for Hebrew is a san serif one, with completely equal weight for the horizontal and vertical strokes. I might be moving in the opposite direction to everyone else—whether the Singer's fifth edition, Artscroll or the Limmud zemiron—but if I'm putting together a siddur, I damn well want something traditional-looking, with heavy horizontals and curly serifs (see below). There are some traditional fonts installed on epicyclic, but they're badly configured: they look fine so long as you leave the vowels out, but if you put them in, many of them are displaced to the left.

Annoyingly, Firefox displays Hebrew in a traditional-looking font fine—but an HTML page for a web browser is not really a suitable package for doing DTP design.

A third possibility is to investigate using ivriTeX (or LyX), but last time I tried that out, ivriTeX couldn't handle vowels, and there doesn't seem to be a new version. So at the moment, I'm a little stuck, and waiting for a solution. Fortunately, I've got lots else to be getting on with for this project—but any solution which involves radically changing formats will involve having to redo the laying-out work I've already done.

---

Which brings me nicely onto something I've been meaning to blog about for ages: Hebrew font design. ( Musings on Hebrew fonts )