Tiberian Hebrew font situation

From: ekeown@student.umass.edu
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 18:23:05 EST

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              Elaine Keown
              Amherst

    Dear John Hudson and Everyone:

    I've been told by a respected and experienced Hebrew
    font maker that it is IMPOSSIBLE to get all the Tiberian
    Hebrew marks on 1 font under the Unicode system.

    That is, he found it impossible using the existing
    Unicode.

    Hebrew dots actually vary in size--the marks to indicate
    vowels and the change from fricative to stop in a
    consonant are smaller than some of the text markup
    known as "accents" or "te'amim" or "cantillation marks."

    If you look at my endless "Informative Notes" you will
    notice that I mined other Unicode blocks wherever I
    thought it would be just fine to do that. Where possible,
    I attempted to re-use other Semitic dots first, only
    going into Euro, left-to-right blocks where it was
    unavoidable.

    This is actually a really short proposal---I found
    four times as many possible symbols when I included
    the 3 other pointing systems for Hebrew. They included
    many, many other dots........

    Elaine Keown



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