[sword-devel] SIL Ezra fonts

[Chris Little]

On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Daniel Freedman wrote:

> 1. the Dagesh (both Lene and Forte) are not spaced correctly, looking in
> other documents (i.e. my wordprocessor) it seems fine...so it could be
> module related...the dagesh has moved to the left more so than it should.

Indeed, I'm not sure what is causing this.  Cardo seems to render it with 
correct alignment.  It might be our lack of Uniscribe support, which Word 
uses.  The big improvement in this font over other fonts is that it 
incorporates OpenType tables for aligning all the little marks correctly, 
but without Uniscribe or a comparable smart renderer (e.g. Graphite, 
possibly ICU Layout) we don't use this stuff.

> 2. The second problem is that the style of Ezra is actually not correctly
> done Hebrew it is a style that looks similar to printed books, but its not
> quite the same...I would like to make two suggestions...either follow the
> Unicode Times New Roman letters as a basis for an additional Unicode
> Ezra...(also make the cantillation marks less "Arial" and more "Times
> Roman")...or alternatively make them all based on the Torah Sofer script
> (i.e. those found in scrolls), currently, no such UNICODE font exists, and
> while you're about it would be great to have Rashi script also in unicode...

Unless you want to buy us a copy of Macromedia Fontographer, you're 
telling the wrong people.  You might try contacting someone with SIL 
(perhaps through SIL_fonts@sil.org) if you have suggestions.  However... 
they do explicitly state that they wanted to create a font like that used 
in the BHS.  Further, that's probably all they want to create since most 
of their users are most familiar with the BHS and primarily interested in 
working with it.

--Chris