Hebrew transliteration in Unicodě

[MBD]

I bought a semitic transliteration font in unicode (not cheap) but helpful. However, it seems that the transliteration font used in Hebrew is not unicode since it does not display correctly. I had set my Linguasoft unicode font as the export font, but that does not seem to work.

[SkipB]

I would set my export font to SBL hebrew then in my word processor select text and apply your transliterated font. Is there some reason you can't use the BHT from Bibleworks? I have found it to print wonderfully, I use it frequently in the first quarter of Hebrew elements each year.

[David Kummerow]

Part of the problem is that some glyphs necessary for Hebrew transliteration aren't given a specified unicode location. As such, it is a bit difficult to do the conversion and would have to done on a font-by-font basis.

Some characters that are used in Semitic trasliteration but to my knowledge aren't given a specified unicode location yet are:



I'd be curious to know what the location is given for these characters in your Linguasoft font. For my own work, I've just had to map them to a privite use location:



Regards,
David.

[MBD]

I found the unicode hex numbers in my font for all of the letters you gave me. e.g. underscored g is E842, topscored p is E84B. I am not sure what any of that means of course. This font is supposed to be unicode, but is far more extensive that unicode Arial or others. The difficult with fonts from linguasoftware.com is that you need a separate license to be able to embed the fonts. So if you transfer your file using them to say PDF or mail it to somebody they do not display. There is nothing more frustrating than to try to embed fonts to send to a publisher or to SBL and to find there are fonts somewhere which license restrictions does not allow embedding! However, you can get a license (more $) to get embeddable fonts. This license was not helpful to me that only uses it occasionally, but we agreed on a one-time licensing fee that was mutually satisfactory.

[David Kummerow]

Thanks for replying back as I was keen to know what they had done with these particular characters. Positions e842 and e84b are in the private use area of the unicode specification, so they've done what I did. In the absense of having a designated position, they just created one in the private use area.

Is it possible for you to list what positions they've given the other charachters I've listed? I could then alter my fonts to match their specification at least.

Thanks,
David Kummerow.

[doc_dave]

A very nice Unicode font including all glyphs required for Hebrew transliteration (and more), and without the license restrictions imposed by Linguists Software may be freely obtained and used from SIL: Charis SIL.

At some point the SBL BibLit (transliteration) font will also be available, but it's not out just yet.

[SCSaunders]

A very nice Unicode font including all glyphs required for Hebrew transliteration (and more), and without the license restrictions imposed by Linguists Software may be freely obtained and used from SIL: Charis SIL.

At some point the SBL BibLit (transliteration) font will also be available, but it's not out just yet.

Cool links. Thanks!

[David Kummerow]

But note: Charis SIL still misses the characters I listed above, hence is not quite suitable for Semitic transliteration in general. Since it also misses 'p' with line above or below, it's not that suitable for Hebrew transliteration either.

Regards,
David.

[MBD]

Obiter dictum, does anybody know if the unicode fonts included with XP such as Arial and Times New Roman have updates which include new additions to the unicode family? As I understand it unicode is growing and I thought that these fonts might have updates.
Michael

[doc_dave]

But note: Charis SIL still misses the characters I listed above, hence is not quite suitable for Semitic transliteration in general. Since it also misses 'p' with line above or below, it's not that suitable for Hebrew transliteration either.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread (searching on something else for unicode!), but this isn't quite true.

Charis SIL may not have the characters David Kummerow cites above as precomposed diacritics, but they are all available as combining diacritics which works very nicely. AFAIK, this is also preferable to using private use area characters, as that impedes portability of your work.

Hope that helps!