[sword-devel] To cantillate or not to cantillate

[Chris Little]

> Sorry if i took your suggestion wrongly.  My point was merely 
> to explain how other Bible software has made a bad move that 
> we could avoid.  If the fonts are not sufficient, and you put 
> the characters in the text, you end up with a mess.  So i 
> guess my answer to your subject line is, if the fonts are not 
> up to it, don't put the characters in the text, or don't use 
> Unicode.  If the latter is not acceptable, fine.

Yes, I agree.  The problem is how to decide what is an acceptable level
of font support.  Two are commercial (Cyberbit and Arial Unicode MS) and
one is shareware (Code 2000).  And the commercial fonts have
unacceptably bad/erroneous renderings.  But all three fonts are freely
downloadable.

I ended up setting Font=Code2000 and including all marks.  We'll make it
usable by those who don't have Code2000 in 1.5.3.

> I'm learning Hebrew at college this year, and from what i've 
> seen so far (i'm halfway through), you don't really need the 
> accents to understand it. They just help with reading the 
> text aloud in terms of pronunciation and rhythm.

True, but my question would be whether the Unicode can accurately
represent all the marks in the source text we're using.  It seemed that
multiple BETA codes were being mapped into the same Unicode character in
a few instances, but I followed the SIL mapping to their font, which
seems to have the same codepoints as Unicode.

--Chris