Must I have latin in a Hebrew font?

[Mike Thompson]

I really don't want to include a full set of latin characters so
is there an alternative way of soving this:

> Your fonts have no ASCII letters. Nevertheless, Mozilla somehow
> thinks they are included. When I define Mike Hebrew as my
> Hebrew typeface in Mozilla (Solaris 9), I get empty boxes
> ("missing character glyph") on my test pages

Any ideas welcome

[Dick Pape]

Okay -- "any ideas welcome".

I've stepped into these conservations before and gotten in over my head, but there's no other message to respond to....

Edit the font .notdef character. Delete the glyph and set the left side bearing and advance width to 0.

If you can't see the trees there is no forest, or some thing like that... You're welcome.

DP

Bhikkhu Pesala now come save me ...

[Mike Thompson]

Dick,
I was hoping someone else would added their ideas but you were
the only one to dare take on this subject.

Your solution is to hide the problem by making the not-defined letters
disappear. Is this a kind of joke? I must admit it took me days
to overcome being 'blinded by science' and realize just what
you are suggesting!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Bhikkhu Pesala now come save me ...

Even God is said to only help those who help themselves, so I don't what I can do.

Mike. Have you tried mapping your Hebrew characters to two positions? E.g. Hebrew Alef as A and Alef; Hebrew Bet as B and Bet, etc. Surely all that applications want is to find the latin ASCII positions mapped to something, they don't care what glyphs are defined there.

[Dick Pape]

See see see ... I knew he could do it. DP

[Erwin Denissen]

Hello Mike,

I've followed both this post and your post in the newsgroup comp.fonts. I don't have an answer to this issue; that's why I never replied. Josef W. Segur gave a good explanation. You might want to look at other Hebrew fonts to see how they cope with this.

[Yehuda]

Most Hebrew fonts include Latin characters, which Mike said he didn't want to do.

[Mike Thompson]

Thanks for your concern. Yes there are plenty of fonts with Hebrew characters sitting where latin characters should be. My family "Mike Hebrew DW" does that, but it only works with DavkaWriter. There are other Hebrew fonts in which Hebrew occupies the OEM code page so that the latin characters with accents are replaced instead,

I'm aiming at satisfying future technologies rather than supporting older applications which is why I have chosen Unicode. I'm currently reading up on the subject of browser compatibility. As I understand it , browsers particularly Internet Explorer try to work with any old font or encoding that comes along. To do this, it guesses what its receiving using complex logic (hacks).

As I understand it, commercial web developers in Israel use software such that they see right to left Hebrew but the browser thinks its displaying left to right English. There is an elaborate deception to acheive this involving a special 'Intenet Font'. I don't want to go down this road.

I'm now considering putting in a Latin alphabet. I would take some font and modify it. Minimally this would mean changing the x-height to match Mike Hebrew and also to modify the ends of the strokes. If any one knows of a Latin font that would match Mike Hebrew I'd be interested.

A problem is the 'italic'. Mike Hebrew Italic is leaning to the left whereas most Latin italic fonts lean to the right. This is an aesthetic problem.
Currently I have the numbers leaning to the left which looks odd even if consistent but to have the whole alphabet leaning that way would be decidedly odd.

[Mike Thompson]

I have installed Microsoft Office with Word 2002 on Window XP Pro
with the intention of testing Mike Hebrew.

Office comes with a set of fonts from Guttman of Jerusalem, Israel.
Looking at these in FCP reveals:

a) The fonts include a full set of Hebrew characters, vowell points
and cantilllation marks. Also lots of punctuation, numbers, currency
symbols etc BUT NO latin letters.

b) They have set bits for only the following Unicode ranges:
Basic Hebrew, Extended Hebrew and Alphabetic Presention Forms.
They have set bits for only the following code pages:
Hebrew (1255)
Note that NO LATIN ranges are set.

c) All the glyphs for the vowel points are set with the left extremity
of the glyph at x=0 and zero advance. It seems that some software
in Word moves these glyphs to position them below the midpoint of the
alphabetic character. (These fonts are True type not Open Type)

If I do the above to Mike Hebrew, I works well in Microsoft Word
but alas I ceases to work properly for Mellel on OSX.

So much for standards!