Comments on: Hebrew Font Issues

By: ani

ani — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:31:17 +0000

Hi,
I am trying to install Hebrew Qwerty fonts in my lap top, Windows 7. Since the option of ASDF or QWERTY doesn’t exist I tried installing a software I had for Windows XP, but it doesn’t work. How else can I install it? Thank you!

By: Gary Levine

Gary Levine — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:46:12 +0000

Just a question regarding Hebrew fonts for the MAC.
I have assembled hundreds of Hebrew fonts for Windows over the years. Can some/all/any of them be transferred to use on my MAC. If not, where are good sources — free or paid — for Hebrew fonts for the MAC?
Thanks.
G.L.

By: Jack

Jack — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:41:31 +0000

I’ve been experiencing the same sorts of problems in OSX. Evidently MacOS’s text layout engine doesn’t natively support more complex typesetting features (as you’ve noted). Mellel and others use their own layout engine, that’s why they work so well. You’ll notice that SOME more advanced features work in things like text-edit (vowels line up, but don’t react to contextual clues, etc.), but Firefox (and for me, safari) still don’t display correctly (though I am still running Leopard, I can’t speak to 10.6).

I have been pulling my hair out for the last two years trying to come up with a way to get vowels to display properly in anything other than Mellel. I would REALLY appreciate it if Apple would incorporate this into one of their updates. Until then, any Hebrew that I write with vowels is being done in Mellel.

By: Karyn

Karyn — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:50:49 +0000

Just out of curiosity, Tim, are you seeing SBL Hebrew or another Hebrew font on John’s site?

By: Tim Bulkeley

Tim Bulkeley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:49:18 +0000

I use FireFox 3.5.5 on Vista and XP and John’s site displays with no problems.

By: Karyn

Karyn — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:23:27 +0000

Hi Andre, Make sure that you have the Unicode version of the Ezra font. It is known as Ezra SIL. Go here for all the documentation and downloads for that font. Since Ezra SIL is a unicode font, the mapping is the same as any other Hebrew unicode font. So, if you use the Hebrew Qwerty keyboard, the vowels and letters are all in the same place. What you want to find is a keyboard map for Hebrew Qwerty so you know which keys to use on your English keyboard to get the Hebrew. You can find read a little about that here. The OBSOLETE version of Ezra is SIL Ezra. This is a "legacy" font (non-Unicode), and you can read about it here. KLT

By: andre

andre — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:02:12 +0000

Hi Karyn, great blog. I’m trying to figure out how to add vowels using the Ezra font on Mac with Hebrew Qwerty keyboard input. Would you mind sending some pointers? I haven’t found anything online.. my email is

areis74 at gmail.com

thanks!!

By: Andrew Vogel

Andrew Vogel — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:27:17 +0000

I use Google Chrome on Windows Vista and it displays it correctly. Besides that advance, you may find it having other significant advantages over Firefox and IE . Notably it is faster at rendering pages, faster running JavaScript, runs tabs in separate processes (more stable), and sandboxes all code (more secure).

By: Karyn

Karyn — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:39:03 +0000

Hi Tomer. Thanks for stopping by.

You said, “I know that WordPress can deal well with Hebrew with it default installation, even when you don’t use the Hebrew locale on it.” This was not true in my case. Prior to doing the change indicated in the post, when I tried to use Hebrew or when commenters tried to insert a Hebrew word into a comment, WordPress would replace the text with question marks. After changing that one piece of code as mentioned above, I am able to include Hebrew with no problem. You are right that there are a few issues with previous posts that must be hand-fixed (because WordPress was thinking that UTF-8 encoding was happening and stored special characters in the database incorrectly). I’m happy to go back and change those issues on a case-by-case situation so that the Hebrew encoding works properly now.

By: Tomer Cohen

Tomer Cohen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:35:33 +0000

I don’t think that removing the db character set definition from WordPress should do anything good other than using the default encoding from your database, which may cause some problems if you’ll ever migrate your website to another server.

I know that WordPress can deal well with Hebrew with it default installation, even when you don’t use the Hebrew locale on it.