Mike Hebrew v103

Gallery
1

This is a purely Unicode version of Mike Hebrew. The proprietary mapping for the wordprocessor DavkaWriter has been removed.

For background information, see
http://www.cunliffethompson.com/font

The font consists of Hebrew characters, nikud (pronunciation indicators) and trop (cantillation indicators). I have also added numbers, punctuation such as brackets etc. It is difficult to know what to characters should be added other than Hebrew.

http://forum.high-logic.com/postedfiles/MikeHebrewRegular_v103.ttf
http://forum.high-logic.com/postedfiles/MikeHebrewBold_v103.ttf
http://forum.high-logic.com/postedfiles/MikeHebrewItalic_v103.ttf
http://forum.high-logic.com/postedfiles/MikeHebrewBoldItalic_v103.ttf

Right click on the above links and select [Save link as…]

2

It is difficult to know what to characters should be added other than Hebrew.

Unicode offers us a lot of possibilities, perhaps too many. I noticed that @ is mapped to © symbol. Does @ have a differnt usage in Hebrew?

Here are some suggestions. Is there any need to quote English words in Hebrew documents? If so, perhaps abc would be useful.

You have $ sign, but not £ or ¥. Is punctuation needed? Em-dash, en-dash, ellipses, bullet, or non-breaking hyphen?

@ABC..xyz£©®¹²³×÷–—†‡…:trade_mark:■□:black_small_square::white_small_square:○●◐◑★☆:telephone:☐:check_box_with_check:☒☩:frowning::smiling_face::slight_smile:•

I see that no code pages are defined. Calculate, surprisingly, does not check the Hebrew code page.

There are a lot of off-curve extremes. I once came across a font with some characters that would not display correctly. I found that removing the off-curve extremes fixed this problem. It is very easy to fix with the Font Validator though I am not to sure how important this is. A lot of fonts work fine although they are full of off-curve extremes, and other problems.

3

Bhikku,

Thanks for pointing out my cut-and-paste error with “at” pasted into “copyright” fortunately only in Regular.

Hebrew Unicode fonts sometimes include a set of Latin for convenience so the Hebrew typist will not have to switch to Latin so often. Looking at a page of Hebrew that happens to be in front of me, I see the words “Caps Lock” and “Shift” in a sea of Hebrew. They are as aesthetic as sore thumbs. Including Latin allows the Hebrew font designer to ensure that these islands of Latin are not too distracting.

Unfortunately I can’t imagine undertaking the amount of work involved (unless I steal a suitable Latin font).

I will study some Israeli publications and see how which special characters they use most often.

I take note of the number of off-curve extremes - a result of my having deleted as many nodes as possiible.

4

First of all, I don’t think that the omission of the Latin alphabet is such a big deal; and yes, including it would mean a lot of extra work.

As for additional characters, here are my thoughts:

:arrow_right: Currency-symbols: £ is probably useful. I don’t see any need for any others (you already have $, €, and, of course, the Israeli currency symbol ₪). The only reason to include ¥ would be because it is included in the Hebrew code page, which may or may not be a consideration.

:arrow_right: Punctuation: You should have em- and en-dashes. A bullet would be good too. Ellipsis is less crucial, but easy enough to do. Copyright and trademark are used in Hebrew. I have never seen dagger or double-dagger (I suspect that they are not used in Hebrew because dagger looks like a cross.)

:arrow_right: Quotes: One thing I really like about DavkaWriter’s fonts is that they have left and right quotation marks and, for the double quote, a base quotation mark. Maybe you should think about including them (including a base single quote).

:arrow_right: Some thoughts on the Hebrew characters: Some of the Hebrew characters defined by Unicode are kind of useless. The height of uselessness is the final pe with dagesh, which has absolutely no use in Hebrew: a p-sound at the end of a word is always written with a regular pe, not a final. The wide characters seem rather silly to me, and the alef-lamed ligature is kind of outdated.

Finally, a question: Have you abandoned the DavkaWriter-encoded fonts altogether, or are you just keeping them in separate font files? (On my system, I have four sets of Hebrew fonts: standard ones, DavkaWriter fonts, old-encoding Davka fonts, and symbol-encoded fonts which work better with WordPerfect. In fact, the reason I originally got FCP was to be able to adjust Hebrew fonts for use with different programs.)

5

I have the DavkaWriter fonts in separate files named MikeHebrewDBold etc.
It is a lot of work to support so it will get a lower priority than Unicode
however I do hope to eventually get them done (maybe even before Davka
Corp embraces Unicode).

Thanks for your ideas on which characters to add in addition to Hebrew.
Alas all this “stuff” of encodings and support does make for less time improving
the esthetics of the font.

On another topic, do you know if Open Type is considered to produce
a better job at rendering good Hebrew?

6

I have the DavkaWriter fonts in separate files named MikeHebrewDBold etc. It is a lot of work to support so it will get a lower priority than Unicode however I do hope to eventually get them done (maybe even before Davka Corp embraces Unicode).

In Davka’s defense, Unicode has its own problems, and there are good reasons for DavkaWriter not to be Unicode based. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Unicode Hebrew character set is not perfect. I mentioned the final-pe-with-dagesh; I cannot imagine why Unicode includes that character. More importantly, there are characters missing: for example, Unicode does not have a distinct kamatz-katan character, while Davka does. In general, I find the Davka character set superior to the Unicode character set.

Not doing Unicode is also good for DavkaWriter because it gives the wordprocessor more flexibility without worrying about Hebrew handling that is built into (some versions of) Windows. There are directionality issues, for example. Using a proprietary mapping allows DavkaWriter to do its own directionality handling without worrying about interference from Windows. (If DavkaWriter and Windows both reverse direction, you’ll end up going in the wrong direction :frowning: I think this was more of a problem in earlier versions of DavkaWriter.) I also don’t know if using Unicode fonts would allow the kind of control over vowel and accent placement that DavkaWriter has.

On another topic, do you know if Open Type is considered to produce a better job at rendering good Hebrew?

I don’t know of any Hebrew fonts that use Open Type. The Hebrew fonts that came with my Windows are not Open Type, and so far as I can tell none of the Open Type stuff in the Windows core fonts is Hebrew-related.

7

Vusillus has Open Type support for Hebrew. It’s part of Ralph Hancock’s Antioch: http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~hancock/antioch2.htm

The new Hebrew side of Antioch allows the typing of vowel points and full cantillation marks, all of which are automatically positioned by a special OpenType font. With Windows XP and Word 2002 or 2003, you can type any combination of marks that is found in the Bible, including the complex BHS text. Windows 2000 and Word 2000 do not allow some of the more exotic combinations but are fine for less extreme use.

8

Yehuda,
You are right. DavkaWriter does a good job.

The latest version of my font is now availble in a version for DavkaWriter. To distinguish this version “DW” is added to the name. It contains only the proprietory mapping for DavkaWriter with the Unicode mapping for Hebrew removed.

See: http://cunliffethompson.com/font


The images of the web site are old and do not display recent improvements.
I have improved the positioning of nikud and trop. Also some cleaning up on the aesthetics.