Ari Davidow: Hebrew Typesetter Extraordinaire

Hebrew typography got an encouraging boost in the arm with the advent of Adone InDesign ME Creative Suite, known as "CS" (Adobe is up to CS3 already) and MicroSoft/Adobe OpenType font format. Now, the sky is the limit for excellent Hebrew Typography.

OpenType replaces all the strengths and advantages of Adobe PostScript and Apple/MicroSoft TrueType, plus adds many new and powerful aspects never realized before in typesetting.

This is because OpenType features powerful contextual analysis and replacement routines, making it a step above the flat two-dimensional typeface software of the past.

Just like mathematical vector-based outline typeface was light years ahead of the now defunct bitmap font technology (so much so that Adobe won a landmark ruling in US Federal Court to legally protect its PostScript fonts, which the US Copyright Office refused to apply to bitmap font technology, which was considered as "merely typeface data describing letter forms"),

so, too, OpenType typeface software technology is a quantum leap ahead compared to the limited Adobe PostScript and Apple/MicroSoft TrueType typeface software technology.

(I recall that I had a lengthy correspondence with the head of the US Copyright Office, spanning two years, from 1989 until 1991, regarding whether my applications to the Library of Congress' US Copyright Office in Washington, D.C., for various sets of Adobe PostScript fonts were acceptable or not. The US Copyright Office wanted me to add a disclaimer to my applications, because without such a disclaimer, this would set a major precedence and imply typeface software was in deed subject to US Copyright, if it was in the outline software format.

I refused to add the disclaimers, and argued that a typeface software program was similar to telling a story. Two people can tell the same story, but one person can choose slightly different words, with different intonations. Similarly, two typeface software programs can describe or render the same typeface design, but one program can contain differently placed bezier or vector control points. Hence, these two typeface software programs are not the same, and are subject to US Copyright laws, just as books containing words are "intellectual expressions", and subject to US Copyright laws.)

Until know, a Hebrew typeface contained Hebrew character glyphs, dagesh points, nikud vowel symbols, taamim cantorial marks, meteg accent marks, and other diacritic elements to indicated certain grammatical rules. OpenType paved the way to remove the skilled craftsmanship from the joint efforts of the operating system, the application program, and the knowledgeable Hebrew typesetter to the very font itself. From now on, a well-crafted OpenType Biblical Hebrew font would contain all this skilled craftsmanship, and be the result of the talented type designer.

In deed, this is a gigantic breakthrough in Hebrew typography.

Posted by Israel Seldowitz at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Hebrew Typography pages are sponsored by FontWorld, featuring Middle Eastern editions of Adobe-ME software, including InDesign-ME, PhotoShop-ME, Acrobat Pro-ME, and the NEW Adobe Illustrator-ME. www.fontworld.com/arabic/adobeme.html.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Budapest-based klezmer Bob Cohen blogs about unkosher food, mostly, but today he managed to combine that activity with a mention of the family museum in Soncino, Italy, where the first Jewish Torah was printed by the family whose name is still synonymous with Jewish printing. One measly photo.

Some reader of this blog should go and do a more extensive photoshoot and writeup of the museum, nu?

Posted by Ari Davidow at 7:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Posted by Ari Davidow at 8:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This was suggested by Lori Cahan-Simon to the Jewish-Music list of all fortunate digressions, who writes:

There is a marvelous online (and previously real-world) exhibit on the history of the Jewish Book Trade that I thought may interest many of our community.

The exhibit, entitled "Printer, Publisher, Peddler: The Business of the Jewish Book," was produced by the University of Pennsylvania and curated by Arthur Kiron and can be viewed at www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/cajs/PrinterPublisherPeddler.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Judy Pinnolis forwarded this link to me months ago, for an Israeli site with information on early Hebrew newspapers. It's a wonderful browse! עיתונות עברית היסטורית Early Hebrew Newspapers. Note that instead of utf-8, the hebrew is encoded with windows-1252, so if you aren't using a windows machine, the hebrew may not be readable.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't had time to post for months, but I felt a need to extend some props to Scott-Martin Kosofsky, whose lecture on his recent "Book of Customs" I caught today, to my great delight.

What Kosofsky did was to go back over the rich literature of Jewish handbooks from the Middle Ages: "The bestselling guide to Jewish life for more than three centures" on how to live a Jewish year, and put together a lovely amalgam, in English, and including a wealth of woodcut illustrations. This edition is inspired by the Yiddish language "Minhogimbukh", published in Venice, 1593.

As designer, author/translator, and typesetter, Kosofsky was able to create the sort of book that is a pleasure to hold and to look at, even before you begin to sink into the content. For Hebrew, he has chosen Vilna, a font that is truer to the type commonly used in these books, although not one that represents, in my mind, the best of Hebrew typography, then or now. I think we are past due for some revival faces based on those early Italian Hebrew fonts, or even the face, contemporaneous to the "Minhogimbukh" (but not used in it) by Le Bé, the French type designer who did, if I remember correctly, some early faces for Dutch and French printers.

Here is also a link to the NPR interview with Mr. Kosofsky from about a year ago (Sep 29, 2004) by Karen Grigsby Bates. It begins with an intro to Sukkoth.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have an e-mail from Harold Jacubowitz:

My name is Harold Jacubowitz and as a ceramic artist I'm looking for Hebrew metal types that I could use to impress into clay.

Could you help me find some ?

I'm not going to put his e-mail address online for the spambots to glom onto, but if you know of sources for Harold, post them here (that would be fantastic, because then everyone with the same question would get an answer), or e-mail me and I'll pass it on.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 1:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a short notice of a week of solid fun up at KlezKanada, a week-long annual gathering of Yiddish culture buffs at Camp Bnai Brith, about an hour north of Montreal.

First, I borrowed a set of huge wooden type letters from the National Yiddish Book Center. Big, major fun.

Continue reading "A Yiddish-English-Russian newsletter @ KlezKamp" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This item is about Unicode. If you don't think that Unicode matters, or if you have stayed away because it sounds too technical, I heartily recommend Joel Spolsky's "Unicode and Character Sets" page. It's complete title is "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" but don't let that stop you if you aren't a programmer. Much of this applies, in spades, to the rest of us.

I haven't had time to breathe for months. There is a lot of neat stuff that should be noted here and isn't here yet. But I thought I'd mention an especially neat item that killed this afternoon.

Max and Minka have an amazing Yiddish decoder ring on their website (go to www.maxminka.com and click on "yiddish"). This is great for people who have the simplest possible computers and just want to get some decent Yiddish onboard. Unfortunately, to avoid encoding issues, Max made up a backwards, non-standard encoding. Great for one-time use; awkward for turning into a manuscript using commercial fonts.

Continue reading "Trying for Unicode, take 1 (with a bunch of Hebrew on the web tips while I'm on the subject)" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I was typesetting a new Yiddish CD. The song lines were relatively short, so I decided to set English, Yiddish, and transliteration all parallel. My idea was that even if every line turned over, I would still be slightly ahead of what happens when I set, say, Yiddish+translation, plus the same number of lines underneath, padded by a bit of space, for the translation. A bit dense (and not something I'm likely to repeat), but overall, it worked well. I also thought I'd see how I felt about putting the English on the left of the Hebrew. I do see how I feel—I don't like it, even in a layout this dense.

And, as you'll see, I managed to get into big layout trouble, despite InDesign generally making this sort of work easier than any other tool I've ever used. (Yes, in part this means that tools for doing multi-lingual typography has generally sucked big-time.)

Continue reading "From the " word to the wise about layout" department" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend forwarded the URL for an interesting online Judaica encyclopedia, the Jewish Virtual Library. The information is broken into small chunks at times, and like all encyclopedias there is often just enough to whet your appetite, but not enough to answer questions. Still, take a look at the Library of Congress holdings detailed at the Jewish Virtual Library and enjoy. There is enough there to get a sense of Hebrew books and printing and want to learn more.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in the '80s, the weeks before Passover consisted of reading dozens of haggadahs, talking with friends, and gradually cutting and pasting a text that felt right as that year's haggadah. When I first started playing with Acrobat, there were still no standards for Hebrew, but I figured that I could go better than ASCII by encoding the Hebrew as it was then done, and putting it into a form where anyone could download, print, cut and paste.

But, of course, no one wants to do that any more. And no one should have to: we have lots of tools for editing Hebrew, and Unicode fonts. So, this year, a bit late, as usual, I have redone that minimal Haggadah Toolkit and input the Hebrew using Unicode so that it =should= be possible to cut and paste into whatever tool works for you. Of course, by now, everyone has finished the Haggadah and just needs to print them up for the seder Saturday night, but just in case, the new version is now available. And better, it will still be there next year, maybe with a bit more Hebrew, as I have time.

Passover Haggadah Toolkit, v 0.2

Posted by Ari Davidow at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

While I was checking out the Typophile forums yesterday, I found a short, but very useful threat about designing multilingual fonts using FontLab 4.6 (still the current version—runs on Mac or Windows) and, for some features critical to Hebrew OpenType layout, VOLT (Windows-only still?). Tale a look at Typophile forums of multilingual type design tools.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For years I have been under the illusion that many people using word processors and informal tools to create prayer materials "get it", but that official book publishers don't. In fact, it has been a common source of depression for me as I get into discussions with customers, many of whom know Hebrew Typography the way I know davenning (kindly put: complementary ignorance). Customers want their publications to look like the others on the shelf. I can't imagine why. It's a situation that isn't helped by the vogue for "ArtScroll" publications. (I put the name in quotes because ArtScroll:Fine Traditional Hebrew Typography :: Korn:My idea of good rock music, which is to say, it's the sort of loud thing that kids like, but tend to outgrow.)

Continue reading "A new siddur; a new Haggadah" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We all know what a typical, modern Hebrew-English siddur looks like. I covered this in an early >entry on siddurim. But, how did we get there? After all, there is no shortage of historical examples (a few are uploaded in my Polyglots Gallery) of how to mix Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left multilingual texts. I happen to be fond of pointing people to the Porro Polyglot, but there are many, many good examples of books made so that the Hebrew and English work together.

Continue reading "Anti-reader Hebrew-English typography - where did it come from?" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Judith Pinnolis, of the Jewish Music Web Center located a nifty website that she uses to help her type Hebrew: a transliteration tool that creates text that can then be pasted into a standard Hebrew word processor: www.amhaaretz.org/translit.

I found that I cannot paste the text created by this page directly into Dagesh Pro, nor can I paste directly into my HTML editing software (I was hoping to see the Unicode-composed text for HTML purposes), but I =can= paste directly into the ME version of InDesign, and also directly into AbiWord or Hebrew-enabled MS Word. This fact, and the overall design of the transliteration page, lead me to believe that Unicode is being generated. If so, then hebrew text editors will gradually catch up.

In the meantime, the ???? ???? that one sees in some editors (after pasting in the text generated by the transliterator) is an artifact of the fact that Hebrew used to be encoded differently, and is a reminder that the conversion to Unicode, like the move (for Hebrew purposes) to OpenType fonts is eliminating a lot of the twitchy geekiness that has accompanied using Hebrew on computers in the past. And, in the short term, this means that if you are using an editor that doesn't understand Unicode, this tool isn't yet helpful.

Anyway, there is more explanation on the Am Ha-aretz pages, and a great link to David McCreedy's Gallery of Unicode Fonts - Hebrew, so a double bonus of good stuff from Am Ha-aretz' Ami Hertz.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mike Thompson writes in to let me know that there is discussion of a new, and rather interesting Hebrew typeface on which he is working at the Typophile board. Although I'm not seeing deep discussion, the comments so far are useful to anyone considering a similar project, and I like the core design. Take a look at www.typophile.com.

In the meantime you can read more about the font, itself, and download it from Mike's own website, mikethompsonpaintings.com/font.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I seem to have been too busy setting Hebrew to keep up this blog in recent months. Among the transitions I need to note, I have had to remove the link to Dr. Berlin's amazing font archive. As Roger Reid let me know back in January, he has retired. According to a posting on LiveJournal, the font archive was closed on 1/31/05 after nine years of service. The good Dr. does have a personal website at www.drberlin.com, but he has not continued his font activities there.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was just checking out "Hebrew Typography" on Google when I came across this An Anotated Bibliography of Hebrew Typesetting put together by Sivan Toledo at Tel Aviv University, Sep 23, 2001. I have really enjoyed reading it, and it is far more comprehensive than my own bibliography.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have corresponded frequently with Raphael Freeman of Jerusalem Typesetting about using InDesign with Hebrew. He has recently announced the ability to set trup (Ta'amei Mikrah—the symbols that are used to know how to chant/sing from Torah, Haftorah, etc.). He has been working with a local type foundry, FontBit to get a version of their Livorno font with the required characters, and then uses a script with InDesign to set things just right. Here is a sample from the Purim Megillah. Visit the Jerusalem Typesetting website, www.jerusalemtype.com for a free e-mail newsletter and more info.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I have just finished setting a new siddur. That has sucked up time, where there has been time, for a few months. Small project. Less time. I'll try to make some time today, though, to talk about what a wonderful new world I am facing using InDesign ME (supplied by the Font Blog sponsor, FontWorld, if I might extend a grateful plug).

I came down this morning to find an e-mail from Dan Sieradski (better known as "Mobius" of my favorite Jewish blog, Jew*School complaining that he had found a stash of very cool free fonts on the Internet, something called "Ben's fonts, but that he couldn't use them on his Mac with OS X. I downloaded them and confirmed that they were simply standard Windows Hebrew fonts. That's all Mobius needed - he found an appropriate utility to convert Windows to Mac TrueType (TTF) and he was off and running. I decided to try the slower, "read into FontLab, save as TrueType" route, which also works perfectly. Open the font. For whatever reason, FontLab saw these as "MacOS Roman" (odd, given that the fonts were Windows TTF—that may have been a default for the Macintosh version of FontLab). I then set the encoding "to "ISO-8859-8 Hebrew" and saved as OpenType (OTF). Now I have a single version that can be used on any of the household computers, be they Mac or Windows (or, coming soon, Linux).

There is probably a FontLab-related tool to automate this. I'll have to check. While I was at it, I also took a look at some fonts that came with the original version of Dagesh, back when my friends at Kivun, in Israel, were working on it. They don't seem to match any known encoding, but it occurs to me that it wouldn't be such a big deal to convert these, too, to OTF. Since the character sets are larger, the results would be useful for Hebrew with vowels, Yiddish, etc. It's not a project for this week, but it could be coming soon.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Co-Sponsored by the KlezmerShack and Boston Workmen's Circle

Aaron Lansky: Outwitting History

This website is very pleased that our alter ego, the Klezmershack is co-sponsoring a reading by Aaron Lansky, founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center, one of our favorite places (Aaron being one of our favorite people as well). As readers of these pages know, the NYBC is not only a great place, but most recently they went way out of their way to help me prepare materials for a lecture on Yiddish typography. The reading is part of the Boston Jewish Book Fair (Nov 7 - Dec 10) and is presented by the Miriam Goldman Author's Fund.

Thursday, Nov 18
7:30pm
$5 JCC Members / $8 General Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center
333 Nahanton St.
Newton, MA
www.lsjcc.org

For ticket reservations and info: 617 965-5226

Continue reading "Klezmershack co-sponsors reading by Aaron Lansky, of the National Yiddish Book Center, Nov 18, Newton, MA" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A query on the UYIP list for "free Yiddish fonts" drew this response from Gerben Zaagsma:

Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive can be found at: user.dtcc.edu/~berlin/fonts.html

There is a link to "Ancient/Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Typefaces" in the left frame. The Yiddish font is called "Ain Yiddishe Font". It is a zip file and if i remember well it can (after using a conversion utility) be used on Macs as well as Windows-based computers.

Note that the quality (both in terms of how the characters are drawn, and especially in how they fit together) may not be professional, but that doesn't matter for most uses of the fonts. [ari]

Posted by Ari Davidow at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Just a short note to say that there was no internet connection at KlezKanada, so I put up nothing while I was there. As I get caught up on post-vacation stuff, I will be putting up the slides from that Hebrew Typography, although I didn't write out the lecture and I'm not sure how I will integrate the two. We'll see.

I had a good time with the workshops talking with people about using Hebrew and English together. Some folks needed to know how to add Hebrew resources to their current computers. Everyone already had either Word, or a working Hebrew/English word processor, so I didn't do my AbiWord training. A lot of people are doing interesting projects, so I look forward to seeing how things proceed. I gave out the handouts that I put online here just before leaving, and they seemed well-received. Further comments always welcome.

Other than projects here at home, the upcoming weblog project will be notes on a mahzor (High Holiday prayerbook). Unfortunately, since the High Holidays are upon us, that will now have to wait until after the holidays, and we'll see how the new synagogue mahzor corrected minor issues I had last year (quite likely) or introduced new ones (less likely).

Posted by Ari Davidow at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have added two new webpages to support the workshops I will be giving at KlezKanada.

If you haven't added Hebrew resources to your computer and you are running Windows NT or later; MacOS, or Unix, then take a look at my Hebrew Keyboard Layouts page. So far, this is most useful to Windows users, but there are resources for most platforms. Let me know if they are helpful, if you find errors, improvements, etc.

In as succinct and short manner as I was able, I have outlined a few very basic type tips: things you absolutely need to pay attention to if you are doing songsheets, CD notes, or whatever. These rules are going to be new to a lot of people, and they will result in texts that look "funny". That's because usability is generally ignored, and most of the multilingual materials being distributed are dreck—that's a technical term that means "opposite of usable". Still, this stuff is very simple. It follows rules that have been used for thousands of years. We're going to have a short workshop, I think, and that's fine. I like to teach the way O'Reilly used to do books: only for as long as it takes to cover a simple subject.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I went out the NYBC (www.bikher.org) back in May, I got a lot of help from Associate Director Catherine Madsen who dashed all over the building fetching likely image-able posters, boxes of type, and books. She connected me with the Collections Manager, Aaron Rubinstein, and we agreed that I would come back in August, after he had come back from the Columbia U/YIVO Yiddish institute, and do a round of imaging of "interesting book covers."

Continue reading "Art Nouveau and Art Deco Yiddish at the National Yiddish Book Center" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Continue reading "Some last minute research at the Brandeis University Library" »

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