Posted by: John Hudson
What about Hebrew kerning? The only thing that doesn't work as I would hope is that kerning for common punctuation characters like comma and period that are used in modern Hebrew is not being applied in Word. But all the other kerning in the SBL Hebrew font is working fine. If it isn't working in another font, that's the font's fault not Word's.
Kerning for Hebrew in Word is handled by the Uniscribe script processor, which applies OpenType GPOS kerning for Hebrew.
The tricky aspect of Hebrew kerning, which I am working on refining in the v2.0 release of the SBL Hebrew font, is contextually adjusting the spacing when adjacent letters have marks below them. For narrow letters, especially, it is necessary to increase the spacing slightly to avoid the marks colliding. This is very fiddly, and I wasn't happy with the rather coarse way this was addressed in the current shipping versions of SBL Hebrew, so I've devised a new approach, which is much more complicated but provides better results. I've tested this approach in Word, other Uniscribe apps, OpenOffice.org, and Adobe InDesign ME; some of our colleagues have tested it in Mellel for me.