Cantallation Marks

Fred Goldman · Post by **Fred Goldman** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 2:14 am

With Biblical Hebrew you have three differnet kinds of gyphs. The letter, the vowel, and the cantallation marks. Sometimes the kerning pair of a letter and a vowel would have to be changed if there is a cantallation mark under the letter. Would there be anyway to do this with Font Creator?

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 9:16 am

What order are the characters typed in? If the vowel is typed before the cantellation mark you should be able to adjust the kerning between the cantellation mark and the vowel.

Fred Goldman · Post by **Fred Goldman** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 7:40 pm

I'm sorry I know it has been almost forever since I posted this. It would normally be typed in this order: letter, vowel, cantallation mark. But does that mean it must be typed in that order? I don't see why, since in the end the cantallation mark and vowel are both either above or below the letter.

William · Post by **William** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 9:53 pm

Chapter 8 of the Unicode 4.0 specification has some notes about Hebrew script.

A pdf version is available from the following web page.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/

The pdf versions of the two Unicode code charts for Hebrew script are available from the following web page.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

William Overington

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 9:53 pm

Yes. The order does matter, or you will need twice as many kerning pairs to allow for the case when the cantellation mark is typed before the vowel.

Think about the kerning of English capitals LAT and LTA

L and A don't require kerning, but A and T do. So do T and A.

If the vowel is kerned negatively relative to the consonant, then the cantellation mark may also need to be kerned positively relative to the vowel to remain in the right place. If you don't always want the cantellation mark kerned with that vowel then you have a problem.

Perhaps you may need Open Type features for Hebrew to make glyph substitutions for certain letter pairs, but I don't know enough about Hebrew or Open Type to help you there. Font Creator doesn't yet support editing of GSUB tables for Open Type fonts.