Re: The display of *kholam* on PCs

From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 15:08:55 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: The display of *kholam* on PCs"

    John Hudson wrote at 11:23 AM on Thursday, March 6, 2003:

    >At 09:00 AM 3/6/2003, Dean Snyder wrote:
    >
    >> From <http://www.sbl-site.org/Newsletter/12_2002/SBLfont.html>:
    >>
    >>"SBL is pioneering the design of three unicode fonts for Hebrew, Greek,
    >>and Latin, in conjunction with a professional type foundry,
    >>Tiro... SBL and the font foundation will lobby Microsoft to distribute
    >>the font with its future releases of Windows."
    >>
    >>Will you similarly lobby Apple?
    >
    >You would have to ask the guys at SBL. My guess is that they would be happy
    >to see the fonts as widely distributed as possible, so that they are
    >available for scholars to standardise on text processing and publishing
    >workflows. The only potential problem I see is that the fonts are OpenType
    >and rely on system resources (e.g. MS's Unicode Script Processor,
    >Uniscribe) to apply the layout features in the font to text. Apple have not
    >adopted OpenType Layout support, although they support the file and outline
    >formats, so the fonts are going to be of limited use to Mac users for now
    >(although they should work well in some Mac apps with internal text
    >engines, e.g. the Middle East version of Adobe InDesign). It would be
    >*possible* to make an AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) version of the fonts,
    >but I don't think this is at the top of anyone's priorities at the moment,
    >and would require additional funding.
    >
    >John Hudson
    >
    >Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    >Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    Has this Windows-only model of distribution been widely aired amongst the
    membership of the Society of Biblical Literature? I know that many SBL
    scholars use Macintosh computers, and for publishers to accept only
    Windows-generated documents seems an onerous restriction, particularly in
    such a large and internationally diverse organization as SBL.

    Also, are you saying that the requisite font layout features are only
    doable via OpenType?

    Respectfully,

    Dean A. Snyder
    Scholarly Technology Specialist
    Center For Scholarly Resources, Sheridan Libraries
    Garrett Room, MSE Library, 3400 N. Charles St.
    The Johns Hopkins University
    Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

    office: 410 516-6850 mobile: 410 245-7168 fax: 410-516-6229
    Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project: www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
    Manager, Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding: www.jhu.edu/ice



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