Ari Davidow: Hebrew Typesetter Extraordinaire

I have just finished reading the marvellous book by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole on the Cairo Genizah, Sacred Trash. I am also busy at work (again, but perhaps this time with actual visible results to come soon) on a new website on Hebrew Typography. While such a site should contain an active blog (as this one does not, but could), it should also contains information that, like the many shards found in the Genizah, is not available elsewhere and needs to be assembled into a coherent whole. If I could tell that story as well as Hoffman and Cole have illuminated both the process of exploring the hundreds of thousands of Genizah artifacts, and what we have learned from them, it would be a big deal.

Unfortunately, while I have been quite facile with web technology this past decade or so, I find my memories of Hebrew type in need of refeshment. So, what should such a site cover?

• Hebrew lettering—obviously, some discussion of Hebrew letterforms, including the early "chicken scratches" used until (if we assume that Birnbaum is still authoritative on this subject) the first exile. A few words at least on mystic traditions attached to the forms? Obviously, some space on the various calligraphic styles that have developed over the past two or three thousand years
• Hebrew printing—we start in Italy with the earliest printers, then on to Soncino (credit Griffo?) and Bomberg and how Bomberg's Talmud really changed how we study Talmud--is this the first time we got the hypertext layout? Then on to early European types, the "Yiddish types" (Ittai Tamari has done great research on this subject, but only in German--has he published in English? Then there is Herbert Zafren's work), the great Hebrew types of the Middle Ages--Le B^eacute;, Kis, Van Dyke (not convinced); certainly spend time on the early 20th century with Frank-Ruehl, Chaim, etc.; then the great Israeli explosion of the 1950s (more of less--start w/Koren which is earlier, but then types of David, Narkis, Friedlander, Yarkoni); modern Israeli type--there is some wonderful work happening, both traditional and avant garde--note Oded Ezer)
• Multilingual typography—The difference between what we are used to seeing (dueling languages and straight, opposite margins), and what thoughtful typographers do to ensure usability, grace, and readability (how/when to position Hebrew, transliteration, translation in reference to each other and examples that make the case that paying attention makes a difference. This, of course, is my own favorite subject. Should also be some notes on appropriate sizing of say Latin U/lc and Hebrew w/ or w/o vowels.
• Technology?—It may be worth inserting something somewhere about the difficulty of setting Hebrew with nikud, trup, etc., from the setting of separate lines in the metal, to the various compromises used in modern systems, if only to help explain why there are some things that require special software (or lots of time and effort in cold metal), so that people know what the problems are and when to look where for solutions.

Does this make sense? What am I missing (or including, pointlessly)? What are sources to which such a series of writings must refer? (by which I mean not just the Birnbaum volumes or Friedlander's booklet on designing Hadassah, but, say, the Porro polyglot)

Until I fix this blog (coming, I hope), just email me comments.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I work at the Jewish Women's Archive, and we have a "proof of concept*" map mash-up (http://jwa.org/onthemap) in which you can note a location and then describe the life or events that took place at that location. While visiting calligrapher, teacher, printer Lili Wronker at her retirement home last month it occurred to me that I would take great comfort in noting the address in Queens to which I--and many others--made pilgrimmages over the years to learn, to share, and to enjoy good conversation. I posted a preliminary description of her work at http://jwa.org/onthemap/jamaica-ny-home-of-hebrew-calligrapher-lili-wronker and invite others who know her to add comments and information. There is also a link there to the video about her that was put up on YouTube a couple of years ago and, of course, a scan of the work that was published in Briem's delightful Sixty Alphabets book a quarter of a century ago.

What other women belong "On the Map" there? Who will be the first to add a new entry?

*"proof of concept" - we did something quickly, almost over a weekend. Now we have to find the funding and the resources to do it well and integrate it with the rest of our Archive

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the Jewish Women's Archive we got the following query last week from a correspondent in Lima, Peru (How appropriate to get a question about Jewish printing on the eve of Shavuoth!):

I would like to know if you could help me find a list of books published by Judith Rosanes on the internet. I have not been successful in my attempts. It would be very helpful.

The question was prompted by an article in our Encyclopedia of Jewish Women on Jewish women printers. Rosanes was one of the printers profiled briefly in the article, which also notes:

"Among the many women printers in Eastern Europe, perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is the preponderance of Jewish women involved in the printing profession in the city of Lemberg (Lvov) in the nineteenth century. Until 1782, when the Austrian authorities ordered the Hebrew printers of Zolkiev, a small city near Lemberg, to move to Lemberg to facilitate censorship, Lemberg had no Hebrew printing, but it quickly became a printing center for Jewish books which were then distributed throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkans. "

At the suggestion of Scott-Martin Kosofsky, I emailed several notable bibliographers, and got an immediate post-Shavuoth reply from Sharon Lieberman-Mintz of JTA.

"I did a quick search of the name רוזאניש, יהודית in the The Computerized Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book and saw there were numerous entries under her name in both Zolkiev and Lemberg. This resource, on a disc is available at some of the major Judaic Libraries (JTS, NYPL etc). One needs Hebrew to access all the information. You can also find information on "The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book" a bibliographic database covering approximately 90% of all the books published in the Hebrew language over a period of 500 years—from the year 1470 to 1960. The Institute of the Hebrew Bibliography (IHB), also known as the Mif'al Habibliographia Ha'ivrit (MHH) is jointly administered by the Hebrew University and the Ministry of Education and Culture. This is also an online resource available through many Judaica Libraries."

which took the original question and provided information on the specific and so much more. If you have other information relevant to the question, please comment here or email me and I will happily convey it further. Many thanks to Scott and especially to Lieberman-Mintz for suggestion and an excellent, research-expanding answer.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had the good fortune to meet Ismar David a couple of years before he passed away and thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the design of his signature "David" typeface from him. Now, the wonderful Misha Beletsky has put together a short monograph on his book jackets. It includes a short essay on the history of book jackets, and a short bio of Ismar David that puts his exquisite calligraphic work in context. The sum total is a lovely diversion and a welcome addition to my bookshelf (although I anticipate sharing it widely, so it may not be on the bookshelf when I go looking for it).

At $19.95, the book is quite modestly priced. It is available from RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press and other fine vendors.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this month's email from the National Yiddish Book Center is an announcement of a lovely slide show exhibit of Yiddish book covers by Izak Rejzman, executed in the middle of the last century. The landing page also contains some brief biographical remarks.

I wish I had known about this material when I was putting together my Hebrew typography lecture, and will surely use some of them next time I teach that class:

http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/slideshow/book-covers-by-izak-rejzman

Posted by Ari Davidow at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Copied from Robin Cover's XML Daily Newslink for 10-Sep-2009:

Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts
Richard Ishida (ed), W3C Technical Report

W3C announced the publication of a Working Group Note on "Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts." The document was produced by members of the Internationalization Core Working Group, part of the W3C Internationalization Activity.

The document provides advice for the use of HTML markup and CSS style sheets to create pages for languages that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc. It explains how to create content in right-to-left scripts that builds on but goes beyond the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, as well as how to prepare
content for localization into right-to-left scripts.

The specification is intended for all content authors working with HTML and CSS who are working with text in a language that uses a right-to-left script, or whose content will be localized to a language that uses a right-to-left script. The term 'author' is used in the sense of a person that creates content either directly or via a script or program that generates HTML documents.

It provides guidance for developers of HTML that enables support for international deployment. Enabling international deployment is the responsibility of all content authors, not just localization groups or vendors, and is relevant from the very start of development. Ignoring the advice in this document, or relegating it to a later phase in the development process, will only add unnecessary costs and resource issues at a later date. It is assumed that readers of this document are proficient in developing HTML and XHTML pages..."

www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/

Posted by Ari Davidow at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Intrigued by Ezra Glinter's enthusiastic, if scantily informed review of the work of Israeli typographer Oded Ezer (A Bubbling Font of Creativity: Oded Ezer and His Hebrew Designs, by Ezra Glinter), I ordered the Israeli designer's recent book, The Typographer's Guide to the Galaxy and had a delightful browse.

Although Ezer has designed several commercial typefaces that I would love to get my hands on an explore, I thought I would focus here on pieces that display his more experimental side. One project described early in the book is a font called "Bet Hillel" intended as an homage and re-imagining/reconstruction of the venerable "Ha-Tzvi" face. I should note that although Ha-Tzvi has fallen out of favor today, it is among the faces I use when I want to evoke a feeling of Israel through the Fifties, even through the Sixties. It is a wonderfully unsubtle monoline expression of "gavriut"—"manliness"—and nicely evokes Uzi ben Gibor. What struck me about Ezer's "Bet Hillel" font, however, is that while the "serifs" (Is this term really appropriate? Is it really the term used by Hebrew typographers to describe the terminating strokes attached to Hebrew letters, as used in one of the articles about Ezer's type included with his book?), anyway, while the serifs follow Ha-Tzvi, the curve and feel of the letters offers homage much more closely to Friedlander's "Hadassah." I have taken the liberty of adding, therefore, a couple of quick scans of Hadassah to a detail grabbed from the book. (Click the excerpt to see a full sample of "Bet Hillel".)

Continue reading "Snapshots from a portfolio - typography of Oded Ezer" »

Posted by Ari Davidow at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Jewish music "Blog in Dm": The Koren Siddur on Yedid Nefesh. According to the author, "Hasidic Musician," the version of ידיד נפש goes back to the original manuscript which eliminates some translation difficulties and makes for what he considers to be a more beautiful poem.

Check it out!

Posted by Ari Davidow at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is an interesting article about Israeli type designer and artist Oded Ezer in a recent edition of The Forward. Although the author does not appear greatly knowledgeable about Hebrew typography, Glinter is to be commended for writing about the subject, and for conveying the idea that fonts are fascinating.

A Bubbling Font of Creativity: Oded Ezer and His Hebrew Designs
By Ezra Glinter
Published July 22, 2009, issue of July 31, 2009.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a very good article about the new Koren Siddur, which I now have in hand. It is a beautiful book, and will surely take it's place alongside my treasured Jerusalem TaNaKh.

Prayer Type
How Eliyahu Koren used typography to encourage a new way to pray
BY JOSHUA J. FRIEDMAN

It will come as no surprise that the new siddur was set by Jerusalem typographer Raphael Freeman. It is also one of the rare siddurim not to put English and Hebrew in "dueling" position—instead, the two languages work together, reading out from a common spine.

Many thanks to Josh Friedman for noticing the book and writing about it with some knowledge and depth.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

Back a couple of decades, when Hebrew on computers was still a messy subject, I met Israel Seldowitz virtually. He had studied with Henri Friedlander, the great Israeli calligrapher and font designer (most famously, Hadassah), and come back to the States to start up a company to market fonts and font software. Here we are some two decades later, and that company, FontWorld, has been the sponsor of the Hebrew Type blog. Now we have captured Israel as a blogger. I will be moving this blog to a new design soooooooon (as I've been saying since I wiped out most of the customized design in an accident a couple of years ago), but not so soon that it made sense to wait any further before letting Israel start writing. His first post follows.

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)

Well, this has actually been available for over a year—I am the dilatory one. British typographer Simon Prais did his thesis some 20 years ago about typesetting Hebrew and Latin alphabets together. I happily talk about it on my Hebrew typography bibliography page. He has created a new website devoted to Hebrew/Latin typography, and the first entry is this thesis:. Check out www.hebrewtypography.me.uk He writes that "I recently gave a presentation from which my talk has been combined with the slides and put into a quick-time movie. I will soon also have this available to download form the same site." Do encourage him to be more speedy in this endeavor than I have been in letting you know of the treasure now online.

Posted by Ari Davidow at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over a year ago, I upgraded this blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. Many things broke during the upgrade, and I haven't had time to fix them. Hoping to go from fire to frying pan, I upgraded again about two weeks ago. Needless to say, more things are now broken. But, I am slowly fixing the code. I try to decide whether it is less time-consuming to start over with new software, which I want to learn, or dig into Moveable Type, which at one time served me very well, and could probably do so again. In the meantime, what I really need to do is to fix the templates so that people can access the goodies that used to be accessible (and still are, if you look at the static pages, like the Hebrew keyboards page). Several of those static entries need updating as well. It will come. I also have a year's worth of entries that want to go up on the blog. With luck, it will be a good Hanukah ;-). Bear with me.

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)