In April 2024, I was allowed to give a talk at a Symposium on Hebrew Typography on essential things to know about setting Hebrew, and about multilingual typography in general. Although my fellow panelists Misha Beletsky and Baruch Gorkin wowed the audience, I felt that my own talk was only half thought out. So I have been pondering a kind of "back to basics" approach. It isn't that Hebrew typography is uniquely difficult (although having a different alphabet and being written in the opposite direction of English does complicate some things). The problem is that most people don't know that typography exists, or that it matters.
I had a fascinating reminder of how little thought is given to either typography (or readability! or comprension! or page design!) this weekend at a retreat. We were reading a familiar Biblical passage from Numbers in which scouts are sent to Canaan to check things out. Those of us who are familiar with the story know that disinformation and fear won the day, and the Israelites arrival in Canaan was deferred another 40 years until a new generation could replace those who had fled Egypt.
As part of the discussion, I was curious about some of the translation. I began reading the Hebrew next to the English, and it took a few moments to realize that the Hebrew I sought was actually on the preceding page of the handout! Let me revive this poor blog long enough to summarize a few of my basic Hebrew/English guidelines and begin the task I outlined in the first paragraph:
- Try to keep the Hebrew and English paragraphs together. Let them share the same starting baseline so that the reader can most easily find related source and translation.
- When transliteration and Hebrew are side by side, it is best to do two things: let them share a common spine (yes, this will drive you crazy, page after page, each page wanting separate adjustment to best use space), and ensure that the line breaks in the transliteration exactly match the Hebrew.
- Look for readable fonts. If you are working with Biblical texts, rather than rely on a PDF or (shudder) image file that is not clear, check out sefaria.org which has just about everything, with all nikkud and trop, right there!—the above sample was created by cutting and pasting (and removing trop) from Sefaria text (also, as you can see above, not all fonts do well at all resolutions - sometimes experimentation helps). I would like to make a point of crediting the Sefaria folks for the text and thank them!
- You can get some great FREE Hebrew fonts free from Google: https://fonts.google.com/?subset=hebrew¬o.script=Hebr. There is also Hebrew, and most (all?) Unicode characters built into common fonts such as Times and Arial.
- Unless you are teaching cantillation, or have a reason for including them, you will make your text easier to read by removing the cantillation marks. Also, most fonts don't include those cantillation marks, so you have an extra reason to get rid of ghost characters! Less is more!
Have comments? You can find me on BlueSky as aridavidow.bsky.social
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