From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Wed Aug 13 2003 - 13:46:42 EDT
John Cowan wrote:
> So it sounds like we might have the following consensus:
>
> 1) The normal way of coding holam-male is using <holam, vav>.
Yes. Especially as this can be done with old fonts by anyone who wishes. The
holam will be farther to the right than one might otherwise expect, but not
perhaps farther than in some of the images in Massoretic manuscripts that have
been displayed.
> 2) It's up to rendering engines and fonts to get the holam in the right
> place in ordinary pointed Hebrew text.
Yes, as with an combining character in Unicode.
> 3) A separate character "HEBREW LETTER HOLAM MALE" should be proposed to
> handle metalinguistic uses, partially pointed text, and non-Hebrew
> text.
To what purpose?
Someone uses a new font on current documents containing mostly unpointed texts.
The holam over vav now appears to far to the left.
To fix it some kind of change is necessary.
Globally changing all vav-holams to holam-vavs is no harder than changing all
vav-holams to a new holam male character. At least the holam-vavs will display
in an old font and be in the proper style for that font if not placed exactly as
conventionally expected. A viewer using an old font will not see a missing
character glyph where holm male should be or a holam male in a different style
pulled out of some other font.
I see no particular advantage to introducing either HEBREW LETTER HOLAM MALE or
HEBREW POINT HOLAM MALE INDICATOR.
We already have a spelling confusion with traditional coding if the holam-vav
method is introduced. Introducing yet another way of writing either holam male
or the holam to specially indicate a center dot holam male creates further
differences in spelling without appreciable benefit.
Jim Allan
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