Hebrew fonts

[lethargic_man]

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.

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Which brings me nicely onto something I've been meaning to blog about for ages: Hebrew font design. For me the quintessentially pleasing classical Hebrew font (by which I mean a traditional font, not one for classical Hebrew!) is that in the siddur I grew up with in shul, the second-edition Singer's Prayerbook:

It has the heavy horizontals, light verticals and curly serifs suggestive of (without quite being in genuine emulation of) calligraphy (see inset). Because it's so traditional, it's very similar to many other traditional typefaces, e.g. that in the Birnbaum and Routledge machzors, and the siddur I was given in primary school:

(This page displays the completely pointless—and potentially confusing—variation in typefaces that characterises many Chareidi siddurim, which the Singer's sought to deliberately move away from.)

The font in the second edition Singer's has for me, a comforting quality that's not quite there in the centenary edition:

and is lacking a bit further still in the first edition, especially in the smaller type:

It's also a very clear typeface: ס and ם, two easily confusable letters, are rendered quite different, as can be seen towards the left of the top line above: Almost the whole lower part of the ס is rounded, whereas in many other typefaces, including all the other ones above, but with my school siddur as a particularly bad example, the only part of the ס that differs from the ם is the bottom-right corner. Frankly, I'm astonished that having had this distinction in the second edition, it was abandoned in the centenary edition. I've been able to read Hebrew with some degree of fluency since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but to this day when I meet a nearly-square letter at the end of a word in a font that does not make this distinction clear, I have to stop and work out which letter it is, if I do not recognise the word.

Until the mid-eighties, I don't think I ever saw a prayerbook that did not use a font resembling one of the above. And then Artscroll came along, and at a stroke revolutionised everything:

I'll make no secret of it; I don't like the Artscroll font. It goes against how Ashkenazim have been printing, and before that, writing, Hebrew for centuries. (The example on the right is from the thousand year old Aleppo Codex.) Those heavy horizontals are important to me—especially the upper one. See, Hebrew is written, in holy documents at least, in letters hanging from the line, rather than on top of the line, like in English. (This is why you'll sometimes see photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls upside-down!) For most of the last two thousand years, the upper and lower bars running along the row of letters have had equal weight, but originally the upper one was more important—see the example on the left from the Dead Sea Scrolls. (The thickness distinction between horizontals and verticals doesn't come across well here; but Wikipedia provides good examples of this distinction from 2500 years ago, exempli gratia to the right.) The upper bar was the one from which the letters hung. On the top line on the left you can see a ל going above the line; the lower part doesn't come down as far as the other letters—and you can see from this how ל (or its equivalent in the related Phoenician alphabet) ended up turning into the Latin letter L.

So here there's this tradition going back 2500 years, and Artscroll come along and in the name of funkiness, trash it. And, to my horror, most people seem to think this is a Good Thing. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a font luddite in Hebrew. I have no objection to new and inventive fonts. I just believe they have their places, and a siddur is not that place.

As if the Artscroll siddurim displacing traditional fonts left, right and centre wasn't bad enough, other people then began emulating them; first the likes of UJS and Limmud, but then even the Singer's Prayerbook:

Now the below isn't quite the same font as Artscroll use, but it's close enough that you need to have a close look at it to tell the difference. That said, there are some good things to be said about the font used in the Singer's Prayerbook fourth edition: it indicates clearly, as do some other siddurim I have seen, the difference between a קַמָץ קָטָן and a regular קַמָץ, and between a שְׁוָא נַח and a שְׁוָא נַע, which is invaluable if you're either (a) not good at reading Hebrew, or (b) don't normally use the Israeli pronunciation scheme.