Making Unicode Work

[Mike Thompson]

I have my Hebrew Font working on the PC with the Davka word processor. This was done by taking a font that worked on Davka and replacing some of the glyphs with ones of my own design.

Now I want to make the font work on Macintosh OSX with the Mellel word processor that uses Unicode.

I opened the [Mappings...] window and selected "Microsoft Unicode BMP only" and the other combo box then showed: "Segment mapping to delta values". For each Hebrew glyph, I changed the Unicode Data from the mostly latin character names to the hebrew names for the characters. For instance the character Dalet, I deleted the mapping LATIN SMALL LETTER C and added the mapping HEBREW LETTER DALET.

After this, the font no longer displayed on the PC. When I double-clicked on the installed font I got empty glyph boxes. Also on the pc the Davka wordprocessor displas mostly empty glyph boxes.

Can a single gyph have two Unicode mappings for instanceLATIN SMALL LETTER C (for Davka to use) and the mapping HEBREW LETTER DALET (for Mellel to use)?

How to proceed?
Mike

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Yes. AFAIK this will not cause any problems. I used dual mappings on some of my Unicode hybrid fonts for backward compatibility with my earlier ANSI fonts. Pali ā was mapped to both 0257 and to 0230 æ for example. One could type either character in Windows to get ā.

[Mike Thompson]

I have been looking at Lucida Grande on the Mac. I has maybe a thousand characters in the font of all manner of languages!
Browsing though this I find the standard Hebrew in range 0590-05ff
but then I also found Hebrew eslsewhere apparantly scattered around
in little blocks amid other languages.
For instance 02183-01286 (decimal?) are four versions of the Hebrew letter shin with different vowel signs.

Similarly there is a block from 01020 to 01060 for dalet, quf, resh and amed.

How can I get a listing of all the Hebrew mappings in Unicode.
Also when I do how can I enter the mappings using FCP as they don't appear to be listed in the "Add Character to Glyph Index Mapping" dialog.

Mike

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Hebrew characters seem to be limited to just two character sets: Hebrew, and Alpahbetic Presenation Forms. Babel Map is a Unicode character map utility that will let you search for a glyph by its postscript name. You can find a full listing of names in C:\Program Files\High-Logic\Font Creator Program\Unicode\Unicode.txt. Just search for "Hebrew."

[Yehuda]

Just to confirm and expand a little on Bhikkhu's answer (all values below are hex):

Basic Hebrew characters are in the Hebrew block (0590-05FF). This includes trop (Biblical accents/cantillation marks), vowel diacritics, Biblical punctuation, the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish additions to the Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew single and double apostrophes/quotes.

The symbol for the New Israeli Sheqel is 20AA (in the Currency Symbols block)

Extra and combination Hebrew characters are in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms block, specifically from FB1D to FB4F. This includes letters combined with an internal dot (dagesh), the letter shin with various dot combinations, the vav-with-a-dot "o" vowel (holam maleh), Yiddish additions which use vowel diacritics, a diacritic used for Ladino, an alternative ayin (which is supposed to be used with under-diacritics; this allows the regular ayin to go under the line), wide versions of some letters, an alternative Israeli plus sign (one that doesn't look like a cross), and the old-style alef-lamed ligature.

[Mike Thompson]

Thanks to all who have helped. The latest version of my font is now available see http://mikethompsonpaintings.com/font.

Mike