Ari Davidow: Hebrew Typesetter Extraordinaire

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.

The letters were actually used in artwork created by the Visual Arts program. That program featured Emily Socolov, Vera Sokolow, and the Montreal calligrapher Jamie Shear. I was supposed to be part of it, but other than giving a slide show about Hebrew typography, I was totally distracted by the newsletter.

The big fun was the newsletter. In format, it tried to be a sort of Junior High School paper—lots of loud type and graphics, lots of articles written by KlezKanada participants, and especially, a chance to present English, Russian, French, Spanish, and Yiddish with ease. I especially wanted people to see lots and lots of Hebrew that wasn't Frank Rühl or those horrible late 19th century van Dijk-influenced fonts that we grew up with. That was the special part.

What made it all work was the combination of Word and InDesign ME. People would type their material on their own computers using whatever (most often Word, but I saw everything from AppleWorks to unknown). So long as Word could recognize the encoding—and in this instance, it always did—it could convert everyone's files to its native Unicode format. Once saved, I could easily place the files in InDesign ME. Layout was a breeze. If you pay attention to the KlezmerShack over the next days you'll see the newsletters go online and you'll find everything from song lyrics in three columns (Yiddish - transliteration - English, per my preferred style) to MadLibs and wild stuff. InDesign didn't care. I have never had to pay less attention to the tool while doing layout. Every day I had from after breakfast (about 9am) until about 11:30 to get all of the material copied, edited, the photos edited, and the whole thing laid out. As the week went on and we went from four pages to six to eight, that schedule got bent, but I never failed to finish the newsletter in time for printing and delivery that afternoon, at worst. (I did realize early on that the laptop computer on which all of this work was done could not handle InDesign and Word and Photoshop using the dread Windows XP with a mere 256MB of RAM. Don't even think of doing this to yourself at home. That machine will shortly contain over 1GB RAM and will finally be "functional").

The biggest deal didn't actually involve Yiddish. KlezKanada brought over a dozen scholarship students from the former Soviet Union. They wrote several pages of thank yous "what I got out of KlezKanada" in Russian and English. To my shock, I was able to copy the file from the Russian computer, read it into Word, and everything was perfect. Tell me Unicode isn't the coolest thing since the square Hebrew letters became popular!

When I think of all the years I spent typing Hebrew and Yiddish backwards and kerning characters into place—not to mention the need to create the special Yiddish rafe characters, or the tzvey-yud pasakh, I could jump for joy. It's all so easy now. In fact, since no one had a Yiddish-enabled computer at camp, I typed the Yiddish directly into InDesign (far less buggy for that purpose than Word).

The American distributor of InDesign ME (Middle East—the localized version of ID that does the RtoL Yiddish and Hebrew with ease), I should mention, is this weblog sponsor, FontWorld. Give them some props. And if you click the small excerpted graphic, above, you can see a whole page of the newsletter in all of its cacophonous, joyous, multilingual beauty. This is a great time to be working with lots of fonts.

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.

In the old days, I would have written a quick python script to move Max's non-standard Yiddish into my own non-standard Yiddish. Now I am working with Unicode and InDesign ME. Must get Unicode. And, I regret to say that after spending hours, I have not been able to write a recognizable Unicode file—one that could be opened in Word with the characters, not the names of the characters, displayed. So, I finally moved to the workaround.

I started each file with an HTML header and noted UTF-8 encoding. Then I wrote all of the characters to the file as HTML entities (in brief, take the Unicode hex, convert to decimal, and put into entity format. So, character 05D0, {HEBREW LETTER ALEF} becomes &s#1488;. By going the HTML route, I also had to make line-breaks explicit—HTML ignores the usual ASCII carriage return-line feed. That meant that I wrote a "<br>" after each line of (in this case) poetry.

Ugly, but it works. Here's the simple truth: Writing Unicode files may be complicated, but writing Unicode entities to an HTML file is entirely trivial.

There are some lessons worth taking from this. First, if you are composing something using the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew, Aramaic, Ladino, Yiddish....) it is very important, if only for your own sanity, to make sure that you are using a modern (released in this century) word processor that understands unicode, and that you have fonts to match. If you are using something like MS Word, there are loads of appropriate fonts that come with. I believe that both the Mac and Windows enviornments provide reasonable fonts when the Hebrew resources are loaded (which come with the operating system, but are not loaded by default).

Second, of course, there are nifty tools like Max and Minka's Yiddish transmogrifier page or Raphael Finkel's Yidishe Shraybmashinke (Yiddish Typewriter). Both are fun to use and great solutions for many one-time or rare uses.

And, I guess another lesson is that I still need to learn how to write a file that will be opened by a Unicode-literate application and understood as Unicode. But, it is very much worth remembering that there is a shortcut: write to HTML, which is rendered in basic ASCII, and let your Word Processor put it all together.

Finally, as I think about putting more Hebrew-alphabet material on the web, it occurs to me that there are some tools for making language explicit that need to be considered. In the recent past, one might indicate hebrew with:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-8">

When I first started thinking about coding webpages so that appropriate spiders would crawl the pages and indicate the correct language, I first looked at the ISO codepages. The presumption would be that if you are using the Hebrew character set, then the language of the page must be Hebrew. Of course, as we all know, Hebrew is one of several languages written with the Hebrew alphabet. This becomes somewhat moot when one starts encoding all pages with the charset "utf-8", because then you are telling a browser that any Unicode character, from Armenian to Korean might be present. So, one must take care to also include a meta language tag. As it happens, such tags exist for several relevant languages. The form is:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

And here are some relevant codes:

(For a complete set, see the W3C's ISO-639 page)

For some browsers, I found it necessary to also indicate text direction if I want words on the web in Hebrew-alphabet-languages to display in the proper visual order. Although this can be expressed as a meta tag, I found it worked much better as shown in this example, from the W3C's Language information and text direction page.

<q lang="he" dir="rtl">...a Hebrew quotation...</q>

I'll have to do some experimenting—I would guess that most of this should be more properly noted in a style sheet so that when you have a paragraph of Hebrew, you would define something like:

<p class="heb"> ... </p<>

Where you have a style sheet for "heb" that includes:

heb lang="yid" {direction: rtl}

where, if I understand CSS correctly, language is an attribute of the style and direction is a property.

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