Font Forum

Does Scanahand support other languages like Hebrew or Arabic or is it only for English?

If it's only for English that would be my request to support more languages .

It only has support for English at the moment — as you can see from the template. I presume that it would be fairly easy to add support for different code pages like Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Greek, as it is just a matter of providing a couple of different blank templates, and assigning different codepoints to the grid squares, but I wonder how many glyphs would be required for Arabic? Don't Arabic fonts need OpenType Glyph Substitutions too?

It might be worth filling in a Scanahand template with the glyphs you need for Hebrew to see just how many grid squares are really needed.

Then there is the question of spacing and combining accents marks that are needed in other languages. There is currently no option for creating composite glyphs from accents and base glyphs in Scanahand.

I don't know if this is possible, but I think the best thing would be to give the user the ability to make templates according to the Unicode ranges they choose. This way you wouldn't have to worry how many characters there are etc. (I myself don't know how many characters are necessary for Arabic, I am mostly interested in Hebrew).

Please see this earlier thread started by Erwin, the program's author.