Posted by:
Sol_23151 John,
Did you say below that the font would be available in May of next year, or
did you mean the end of last month? If the latter, are the font and the
documentation available at the SBL's site yet? If not, when will they be
available?
Cheers,
Gilbert Lozano
Messiah College
Biblical and Religious Studies Dept.
Box 3053
One College Avenue
Grantham, PA 17027
(717) 796-1800 ext. 6724
>>>
tiro@tiro.com 06/02/05 02:14AM >>>
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New Message on SBL Fonts
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From: John Hudson
Message 2 in Discussion
Glyphs and layout support for the new Unicode 4.1 characters have been
added to the next version of SBL Hebrew, which is currently being tested. It
will be released in May.
There are a number of significant changes in the new version of the font,
requiring a substantial rewrite of the manual. Some users may need to
re-encode some documents (e.g. by using search-replace routines or macros).
As those of you who have followed discussions over the past two years
regarding Unicode handling of Biblical Hebrew will know, there have been a
number of uncertainties about how to encode particular things, which are
only gradually being cleared up. In the current release version of SBL
Hebrew, I made some guesses about the best way to handle things, and
sometimes those guesses were wrong or, at least, contrary to what has become
the consensus for correct encoding. The biggest issue is how to encode the
distinction between holam male and vav haluma, and this is something that,
frustratingly, is now largely agreed but only partially implemented in
Unicode.
In the current release version of SBL Hebrew, the character sequence
holam> results in vav haluma, following the convention of holam applied to
other letters. The consensus is now that this sequence would be better
rendered as holam male (visually distinguished with the holam further to the
right), which is much more common than vav haluma, so I have changed this in
the new version of the font. The mechanism for encoding holam male as
has been removed from the font, since it is contrary to Unicode
character ordering rules. There is, at present, no means to encode a
distinct vav haluma: this is something that is being addressed by Unicode,
but which didn't make it into version 4.1 of the standard. So there will
need to be another update of the font for Unicode 5.0, at some later date.
Most other changes in the font should only have a document encoding impact
for a small number of users, since they concern encoding of the rare puncta
extraordinaria.
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