SBL Hebrew font manual v1.5 - Society of Biblical Literature
Contents
1. 22 Appendix C Resource links This appendix provides URLs for font and document downloads and online resources from the Society of Biblical Literature and other parties http www sbl site org Resources The latest version of the SBL Hebrew font this manual and other information relating specifically to SBL Hebrew downloadable Windows keyboard drivers for input of Biblical Hebrew text http www sbl site org Society of Biblical Literature website http www tiro com resources hebrew Tiro Typeworks resources for Biblical Hebrew including normalisa tion example documents In development http www unicode org The Unicode Consortium website Includes latest version of Unicode Standard and resources http www microsoft com typography specs default htm OpenType specification and Microsoft Hebrew font specification http www microsoft com typography developers opentype default htm Windows Glyph Processing article by John Hudson an introduc tion to OpenType font and Unicode script processing on Windows http www redlers com mellel html Mellel is a powerful multilingual word processor for Mac Os x It s handling for Biblical Hebrew is not yet perfect but it is very good http scripts sil org cms scripts page php site_id nrsi amp item_id xetex Download site for the open source XeTeX page layout application for Mac Os X http www winsoft fr Winsoft make the Middle East versions2. Font version 1 50 Manual version 1 5 June 2007 Prepared by John Hudson Tiro Typeworks for the Society of Biblical Literature John Hudson 2003 amp 2007 SBL Hebrew is a trademark of the Society of Biblical Literature Manual version 1 5 June 2007 Version 1 50 of the SBL Hebrew font is an interim release It adds support for Dead Sea Scrolls transcription see page 17 and for the new Unicode 5 0 holam haser for vav character see page 16 and fixes some bugs in previous versions For the most part input and editing is exactly as in version 1 12 and later Version 2 00 is already in development and will be released later this year this update will include more significant changes especial ly refinement of the positioning positioning of marks relative to let ters and to each other and of the spacing between letters especially when one or more of the letters takes multiple marks When we released the first version of the SBL Hebrew font ad equate application support was almost entirely limited to Office 2003 on the Windows platform Since then as subsequent versions have been made available we have been able to note improvements in support both in other Windows applications and on Macintosh and Linux platforms The current version of the manual no longer records such information since the pace of new support is now such that this dynamic information is better presented via the SBL web site For this information down
3. Point Patah 220 18 U 5B8 Point Qamats 220 18 U 5C7 Point Qamats Qatan 220 20 U 5BB Point Qubuts 220 22 U 5BD Point Meteg 222 222 U 59A Accent Yetiv 21 222 222 U 5AD Accent Dehi 230 230 U 05C4 Upper Punctum 230 230 U 0593 Accent Shalshelet 230 230 U 594 Accent Zagef Qatan 230 230 U 595 Accent Zaqef Gadol 230 230 U 0597 Accent Revia 230 230 U 0598 Accent Zarga 230 230 U 059F Accent Qarney Para 230 230 U 59E Accent Gershayim 230 230 U 59D Accent Geresh Mugdam 230 230 U 59C Accent Geresh 230 230 U 592 Accent Segolta 230 230 U 05A0 Accent Telisha Gedola 230 230 U 05AC Accent Iluy 230 230 U 5A8 Accent Qadma 230 230 U 5AB_ Accent Ole 230 230 U 5AF Mark Masora Circle 230 230 U 5A1 Accent Pazer 230 230 U 307 Mark Number Masora Dot 232 228 U 05AE Accent Zinor 232 230 U 5A9 Accent Telisha Qetana 232 230 U 599 Accent Pashta The makers of the SBL Hebrew font would like to thank the individuals and or ganisations who participated in ad hoc discussions to determine an appropriate mark ordering for normalised Biblical Hebrew especially Peter Constable SIL International and Eli Evans Libronix Logos Other contributors included Joan Wardell SIL International Patrick Durusau SBL Ralph Hancock Paul Nelson Microsoft Bob Pritchett Libronix Logos amp Kent Richards SBL
4. a specifically Hebrew character so a generic combining dot above U 0307 is used The same character is sometimes used to indicate a consonant used as a numeral in the traditional Hebrew numbering system amp 1 4 2 J 3 10 3 20 5 30 and so on with nine consecutive letters of the alphabet used for units tens and hundreds up to 400 some sources identify final letter forms for 500 900 This numbering system is extended in some reference books to counting in thousands by doubling the dots R 1000 1 2000 3 3000 etc The double dot is encoded using the generic combining diaeresis character U 0308 The circle indicating a Masoretic note can occur over a consonant between consonants over a magaf or over a word space Ideally it should be centred over a word but there is no way to specify this in Unicode combining mark encoding or OpenType Layout Man ual care must be taken with the positioning The SBL Hebrew font by default places the masora circle above the preceding consonant magqaf or word space as on these examples from the first chapter of Genesis a pylt DIPNOX nan WN The masora circle glyph is centered on a zero width which means that if the default positioning is inhibited it will automatically be placed between the character to which it is applied and the next The positioning can be inhibited by inserting the ZWNJ control character between the masora circle and the consonant maqaf or word s
5. different platforms or published on the Internet that a piece of soft ware beyond the original author or editor s control a web browser on the receiving end of an electronic document for example may apply normalisation This is of course not a font issue per se it is a text encoding issue that can affect any document and result in tex 9 If you are using the Tiro Biblical Hebrew keyboard v1 2 you can insert the CGJ character manually using the key combination ctrl alt 7 If you are using the SIL Biblical Hebrew keyboard you can insert the CGJ character using the key combination shift ctrl alt P See the last paragraph on page 13 for additional examples of mark reordering and CGJ insertion tual error incorrect display or both To avoid these problems the latest generation of Hebrew shaping engines such as Uniscribe for Windows Vista and Office 2007 perform corrective mark ordering during rendering to ensure that normalised sequences can be cor rectly rendered by fonts built to a common specification This will remove many of the possible display problems associated with Uni code normalisation However there will remain a number of cases in which the results of normalisation may display correctly but in which the meaning of the text is changed For instance if meteg is positioned at the right side of a vowel it may be moved to the left side during normalisation both positions will render correctly an
6. intelligence in OpenType fonts relies on system or appli cation support for basic linguistic shaping In simple terms systems and applications deal with characters and fonts deal with glyphs i e with the visual representation of characters Complex scripts like Hebrew require systems and applications to be aware of right to left and bidirectional layout and of character properties that distinguish e g consonants from combining marks Some applications will have built in support for such things while others will rely on standard system components Microsoft s Unicode Script Processor com monly referred to as Uniscribe is a standard system component that includes shaping engines for various scripts including Hebrew Uniscribe works directly with OpenType fonts such as SBL Hebrew built according to Microsoft specifications An application that uses Uniscribe will make calls to it as text is entered and edited Uniscribe processes the input characters and applies the layout intelligence in the font accordingly If you are using an application that utilises Uniscribe these in clude the Microsoft Office Suite on Windows Internet Explorer and any other app that makes standard system calls for text input and output you will find working with Biblical Hebrew text very easy and the SBL Hebrew font will automatically correctly display most text I say most text because there is always the possibility to cre ate sequences of consonants p
7. reliably survive text exchange between different applications and platforms Input support for the Dead Sea Scrools trascription characters is available from version 1 5 of the Tiro and SIL Biblical Hebrew key board drivers available from the SBL wesbite 17 Support in non Windows systems amp applications This section explains the current state of support for SBL Hebrew on Macintosh amp Linux operating systems See Appendix C on page 22 for web link information on Mellel and other applications mentioned in this section The term font support can refer to a number of different things from installability to text display to complex glyph rendering so when wondering whether a particular operating system or applica tion or particular combination of Os and application supports use of a font it is necessary to understand the limitations that can apply Macintosh The Mac os X operating system can natively install and render the SBL Hebrew data fork format Windows TrueType font Older versions of the Mac operating system cannot natively install this format and need a Mac specific resource fork format font file At present no resource fork version of the SBL Hebrew font is avail able since there are so few Unicode enabled applications for older Mac operating systems Note that some applications particularly new versions of much Adobe software on both Mac and Windows can install fonts including SBL Hebrew d
8. Unicode circles The consensus now formally enshrined in the standard is that the character sequence vav holam U 05Bg is the correct encoding for holam male since this is far more common than the relatively rare vav haluma This was first implemented in version 1 12 of the SBL Hebrew font vav holam holam male Version 1 50 of the font supports the new Unicode 5 0 combining mark character HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER FOR VAV U 05BA This character is explicitly intended to encode vav haluma and be haves relative to vav as the common holam dot to other consonants This new character provides a robust encoding distinction for those users who wish to differentiate holam male and vav haluma as illus trated in the fourth and fifth words of this example from Genesis 4 13 NVIN AY DIT MTIR PR INI Nun hafukha inverted nun is not a letter but a form of special punctuation that occurs only a handful times in the Hebrew Bible e g Numbers 10 35 36 Hebrew manuscripts show a number of dif ferent forms for this character depending on the script style only one of which actual resembles an inverted nun letter This character is encoded in Unicode as the character U 05C6 E nun hafukha In pointed texts the inverted nun carries a dot above it For this the masora number dot character U 0307 should be used i nun hafukha masora number dot 16 DSS transcription This section explains the encoding conventions f
9. al marks which indicate an omission or change that the scribes desired to make but dared not c the marks represent drops of ink or even bits of dirt that were slavishly copied from one manuscript to the next d the marks indicate a special or unusual pronunciation of the word or that the word should not be read at all or e some mixture of the above on a case by case basis The most complex example of puncta extraordinaria is in Ps 27 13 in which puncta appear both above and below and with other marks Note that in accordance with the recommend mark or x55 dering on page 12 the complex combination of lamed with above and below marks plus puncta in this example should be encoded consonant vowel puncta below mark above puncta above Also note that because the puncta ex traordinaria are positioning above and below the level of most other marks it may be necessary to increase linespacing in those parts of the text where these marks occur The SBL Hebrew font encodes these marks using the Hebrew up per dot U 05c4 and Hebrew lower dot U 05c5 characters the latter is a recent addition in version 4 1 of the Unicode Standard The atnah hafukh U 05A2 character has been recently included in Unicode 4 1 for the benefit of those users who wish to encode an ex plicit distinction between this accent and yerah ben yomo U 05AA Many editions do not make this distinction using the yerah ben yomo character and its gl
10. ch are applied after other low marks because they are po sitioned relative to them then above marks including metatextual marks such as the masora circle as they occur from right to left ex cept the postpositive marks pashta telisha qetana and zinor The table of marks on the next page shows the order in which they should be entered note that this corresponds also to the recommendations for custom normalisation in Appendix B page 21 11 Table 1 Recommended mark ordering 1 Base consonant 2 shin dot sin dot dagesh mapiq rafe holam anu A W Below marks from the E G E following group as the occur from right to left sheva hataf segol hataf patah hataf qamats hiriq tsere segol patah qamats gadol qamats qatan qubuts meteg atnah atnah hafukh tipeha tevir munah mahapakh merkha merkha kefula darga yerah ben yomo low punctum extra G G G G E G G G G G oG G G GG G G G G G G G G 7 Prepositive below marks from the following group yetiv dehi Above marks from the following group as they occur from right to left shalshelet zaqef qatan zaqef gadol revia zarqa qarney para gershayim geresh muqdam geresh telisha gedola iluy qadma azla ole pazer masora number dot high punctum extra masora circle Postpositive above marks from the following group segolta pashta telisha qetana zinor 4S C E G G G G e g
11. che eee g amp E g Notes 1 See page 13 for specific information about meteg ordering 2 See page 14 for specific information about puncta extraordinaria Note that the high punctum is centered above the letter and above any other high marks it should usually be ordered last of the marks in its group Similarly the low punc 3 12 tum should usually be ordered after other below marks See page 15 for specific information about the masora number dot 4 Although it may visually be positioned slightly to the right of other above marks the masora circle is usually ordered after any other marks in this group See page 15 for specific information about masora circle handling Meteg handling This section explains the vari ous ways in which the meteg mark can be applied and the expected results The Hebrew mark meteg can appear in a variety of positions rela tive to other below marks and all these are supported in the SBL Hebrew positioning lookups However not all are equally well sup ported in applications at the time of writing This section explains how to encode sequences of consonant plus meteg with other marks to achieve different visual results and shows how these will be ide ally rendered The normal position of meteg relative to vowel marks is to the left e g N81 a Kings 1 3 Such a sequence is encoded consonant vowel meteg that is as the marks are ordered from right to left Much less commonly
12. ct to reordering dur ing normalisation see pages 8 11 For instance the example from Exodus 20 J nvyn would be reordered during normalisation such that the meteg shifts to the left of the patah 72 nvyn If the relative position of meteg to a vowel is textually important care must be taken to prevent reordering through automatic or manual insertion of the cGJ character e g bet meteg CGJ patah 13 Puncta extraordinaria This section explains the current recommendation for encoding the puncta extraordinadia illustrating how they should appear if rendered correctly Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with Westminster Hebrew morphology 1996 Logos The lower punctum was previously encoded in SBL Hebrew using the generic combining dot below U 0323 Documents produced with this earlier encoding will need to be updated Atnah hafukh and qamats qatan This section explains two new characters in Unicode 4 1 and their implementation in this version of SBL Hebrew Puncta extraordinaria extraordinary points occur fifty six times in the Old Testament text fifty three times above letters and three times below letters The electronic edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia text notes that the function of these marks is not entirely clear but it has variously been proposed that a the marks are merely emphasis and draw special attention to the theological implications of the word b the marks are early critic
13. d either is textually legitimate So mechanisms are necessary to guard against some mark reordering during normalisation Software developers who need to apply normalisation to text to facilitate efficient searching can of course avoid the problems of the Unicode mark reordering by using a custom normalisation routine that does not reorder Hebrew vowels Combining classes for such a custom routine based on the mark ordering recommendations of the next section are suggested in Appendix B page 20 However this does not address the issue of Unicode normalisation being ap plied downstream of document creation e g in web browsers The Unicode Technical Committee recommends the use of the Combining Grapheme Joiner CGJ U 034F character as a control character to override mark reordering during normalisation and the SBL Hebrew font has been updated to handle this mechanism Us ing this mechanism the problem case of mark reordering discussed on page 9 would be resolved by inserting the cGJ character between the patah and hiriq marks lamed patah CGJ hiriq final mem The cGy character can be inserted between any two adjacent mark characters that may be subject to reordering during normalisation and will prevent this reordering from happening Software develop ers are currently discussing ways in which this can be implement ed automatically so that the burden is not on document authors to identify situations in which mark reorderi
14. ducing the number of in stances in which CGJ needs to be inserted the most important use of CGJ is in instances where the reordered text may render cleanly but where textually important distinctions are lost e g where a me teg moves from one side of a vowel mark to another As discussed in the previous section the SBL Hebrew font can cor rectly display equivalent sequences of marks applied to consonants in different orders The font cannot correctly display every possible permutation especially when more than two marks are involved but it seldom matters for instance whether a below vowel or above cantillation mark is applied to a consonant first That said there are many benefits to establishing consistent habits in ordering marks when creating documents By following the recommended mark or dering outlined in the table on the next page you will avoid enter ing sequences that cannot be correctly displayed unless of course they are beyond the general ability of the SBL Hebrew font to render the Old Testament text and you will also make searching for Hebrew words and phrases easier for yourself and colleagues with whom you exchange electronic documents The basic principles of the mark ordering recommendation is that marks affecting the pronunciation of consonants are applied first then the holam mark then below marks vowels and consonants as they occur from right to left except the prepositive marks yetiv and dehi whi
15. f Uniscribe It is important to note that these se quences may be correctly encoded and that documents with display problems are not erroneous Typically when a sequence of marks cannot be correctly rendered by Uniscribe the shaping engine will insert a dotted circle and the mark or marks that cannot be applied to the preceding consonant will be applied to the circle The example below shows three possible levels of display for a unique sequence of consonant plus marks from Job 7 11 alef hataf patah ZWJ meteg dehi e e e e e L L Tel J J C Incorrect B Incorrect A Correct A This example shows the correct rendering applied by Uniscribe version 1 471 4063 0 which ships with MS Office 2003 This and later versions can be expected to correctly render this and other consonant plus mark sequences B This example shows incorrect rendering applied by Uniscribe ver sion 1 325 2180 1 this is the version of Uniscribe that ships with Windows 2000 As you can see this version of Uniscribe is unable to correctly apply dehi to a consonant that already carries a com bination of hataf vowel and meteg so inserts a dotted circle c This very incorrect example shows the same sequence crudely dis played by an application that does not use Uniscribe and cannot implement the glyph positioning intelligence in the SBL Hebrew font The marks are blindly centered below the consonant but they collide and do not interract correc
16. hese and other online documents please see the list of URLs in Appendix C p 23 Most fonts do not come with user manuals and most do not need them SBL Hebrew is a complex font that uses new encoding and layout technologies and this manual explains these technologies to help you get the most out of your new font This manual also discusses known issues relating to these technologies especially the complicated but important issue of text normalisation Although you can install the SBL Hebrew font on most current operating sys tems and can immediately begin working with it please take time to review this document Understanding issues like optimal charac ter ordering will help ensure that the SBL Hebrew correctly displays your text SBL Hebrew is a TrueType flavour OpenType font The original TrueType font format was developed by Apple Com puters and released in the early 1990s It was quickly licensed by Microsoft Corporation and is the system font format for Apple and Microsoft operating systems the packaging of the format differed on the two systems prior to the introduction of Apple s Mac OS X which can install Windows TT fonts A TrueType font is a collection of tables each containing information specific to a particular aspect of the font For example the glyf table contains outline information the cmap table maps glyphs in the font to character codes for text entry and storage and so forth The OpenType font format is an e
17. ioning Results from applications using ICU seem better Linux based users of the SBL Hebrew font are particularly encour aged to join the MSN user community and to share tips and tricks for working with Biblical Hebrew text on this platform As should be clear from this manual the SBL Hebrew font is on the cutting edge of text processing and layout technology and much software still needs to catch up to the font in order to perfectly render all aspects of Biblical Hebrew texts That said in the seven teen months since the last version of this manual was written there have been encouraging advances especially on the Mac and Linux systems During development of the font key software developers such as the Microsoft development lead responsible for the Uniscribe He brew engine have consulted on the best way to encode and shape Biblical Hebrew and have provided beta versions of upcoming soft ware releases for testing This consultation has enabled us to make a font that outperforms all previous Hebrew text rendering and which will enable Biblical scholars to create edit and exchange docu ments between the increasing number of systems and applications that support Unicode text encoding and OpenType Layout 19 Appendix A End User License Agreement This license agreement explains the rights and responsibilities that you accept when you install the SBL Hebrew font on your computer Please take a few minutes to review th
18. irectly in their own font folders and use their own rendering technology bypassing system font handling some of these applications may provide support on older versions of the Mac operating system The latest version of OS x Tiger implements some system level support for basic OpenType Layout features converting them on the fly to Apple s own AAT format features However this does not include support for complex script layout so the all important mark attachment is not supported at the system level This means that applications relying on standard system calls for text processing will not be able to handle Biblical Hebrew text using SBL Hebrew even though they may support Unicode text encoding and basic right to left layout Applications that use their own text layout engines designed to work with OpenType fonts offer the most hope for Macintosh us ers At the time of writing none of these applications offer the same high level of Biblical Hebrew rendering as Microsoft Office 2003 on Windows but some are gradually getting close Mellel is a word processing application for Os X that employs OpenType Layout natively using its own text engine Biblical He brew test results from Mellel are encouraging with almost all tested letter mark sequences rendering correctly One problem in the cur rent release is that there is no way to turn off visual display of con trol characters so if you insert e g the Zero Width Joiner character in a
19. is 1 The digitally encoded machine readable font software for producing the type faces licensed to you is the property of Tiro Typeworks It is licensed to you for use under the terms of this end user license agreement If you have any ques tions about this license agreement or have a need to use the font software in a way not covered by this agreement please write to license tiro com 2 You may use this font software free of charge for all non commercial purposes If you wish to obtain a license for commercial use of this font software please contact the Society of Biblical Literature at sblexec sbl site org or write to license tiro com Fees for commercial licenses are at the individual discretion of the Society of Biblical Literature and Tiro Typeworks 3 You may redistribute this font software free of charge as long as the software is unmodified all copyright and trademark notices are intact and the font contains or is accompanied by a copy of this license agreement You may not charge any fee for the distribution of this font software or alter the terms of this license agreement 4 You may decompile and modify this font software for non commercial and personal use by you as an individual or internal use within your organisation Tiro Typeworks maintains copyright to all derivative fonts in any format You may not delete edit or add to copyright trademark or license information in the font You may not change the embedding bit Y
20. loads for current versions keyboard drivers and other resources see http www sbl site org resources in progress Getting started Installation File name and icon If you have not already downloaded the latest version of the SBL Hebrew font you should do so now See page 23 for download infor mation and links to other useful websites Please take some time to review this manual SBL Hebrew is a complex font that makes use of new technologies that may be un familiar to you if you have not worked with Unicode encoded text or font files before Many of the lessons you may have learned from using other Biblical Hebrew fonts and software may not apply and it may be necessary to develop some new work habits The SBL Hebrew font is designed for use with systems and applica tions that natively support appropriate Unicode text processing and OpenType Layout Most of this manual is specific to Windows in stallations since this has to date been the most common platform for users of the font and has also provided the best support To in stall the font on a Windows system open the Fonts folder and drag and drop the SBL_Hbrw ttf file onto the folder The Fonts folder can be opened either by navigating in Windows Explorer to c Windows Fonts where c is the root folder containing your Windows system files or by opening the Fonts folder from the Control Panel accessible from the Start button Settings menu Note that if a previous ver
21. lus marks that are linguistically non standard and which cannot be correctly resolved by the layout fea tures in the font The SBL Hebrew font has been tested with every combination of consonant plus mark s that occurs in the Michigan Claremont Old Testament text The results of this testing are avail able as Acrobat documents from the Society of Biblical Literature Hebrew font website and may be helpful in troubleshooting layout discrepancies with different shaping engines 6 Software developers producing software for use in Biblical scholarship can arrange for a redistribution license for Uniscribe This enables them to bundle more recent versions of Uniscribe for utilisation by their software Please contact Microsoft Typography for more information Different versions of Uniscribe ship with and are used by differ ent applications and system versions which means that rendering results may vary We have been fortunate during the development of SBL Hebrew to test the fonts with unreleased versions of Unis cribe that will ship with upcoming software The new versions of Uniscribe have been used to confirm that all consonant plus mark s sequences in the Michigan Claremont text will be correctly rendered when these versions of Uniscribe are employed Because SBL Hebrew has in this respect been designed for cutting edge technology some sequences will display incorrectly in systems and applications using older versions o
22. meteg can appear to the left of a cantilla tion mark e g D39 Ex 20 2 Again this sequence is encoded as the marks are ordered from right to left consonant vowel cantil lation meteg When meteg is applied to a consonant bearing a hataf vowel hataf segol hataf patah or hataf qamats the default font rendering is also for the meteg to be positioned to the left of the vowel e g WANNA Ps 50 21 However it is common for this mark combination to be displayed with a medial meteg positioned between the two parts of the hataf vowel e g DI TON 2 Chr 32 15 This is handled by the SBL Hebrew font using an OpenType ligature substitution when the Zero Width Joiner ZWJ U 200D control character is inserted be tween the hataf vowel and the meteg consonant hataf vowel ZWJ meteg Finally there are those instances in which meteg needs to be placed to the right of a vowel These are relatively common on the first consonant of a word in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia text e g Jy7nwyn Ex 20 4 but may also occur in mid word e g 17939 Deut 22 26 In such cases meteg should be encoded before the vow el i e as the marks are ordered from right to left consonant meteg vowel Note that this ordering should also be used in those rare cases where meteg occurs to the right of a hataf vowel e g NANN Psa 85 7 Note that because of the canonical combining class assigned by Unicode to the meteg character it may be subje
23. ncoding standard for Biblical Hebrew and for users of the SBL Hebrew font An 8 bit encoding is one that uses a single byte of computer memory or storage for each character in text 8 bit encodings are limited to 256 characters which explains the need for multiple encodings essential to being able to use the SBL Hebrew font but it will help you better understand that technologies on which the font relies The SBL Hebrew font uses standard Unicode character codes to en code Hebrew letters and marks Unicode is an international char acter encoding standard that provides a single unique code for eve ry semantic element necessary to encode plain text in supported scripts and languages Today most of the world s major scripts and languages are supported by Unicode and recent efforts have led to the encoding of numerous historical scripts Because every character in Unicode has a unique code rather than sharing codes across mul tiple codepages or being assigned to different codes e g on Windows and Mac operating systems text encoded in Unicode can be safely exchanged between different operating systems and applications that employ Unicode The benefit of such a standard to scholarship where authors and publishers are often using different software should be obvious In the past Hebrew text was supported on different platforms and even between different applications using a variety of stand ard and not so standard 8 bit encodi
24. ng might occur and to manually insert CGJ at these places It may be some time before such solutions become widely implemented If you are not concerned about mark reordering e g because you are working in a completely closed text environment that does not employ normalisation or which uses a custom normalisation rather than the Unicode one you do not need to worry about the CGJ char acter in this regard If you are producing documents that may be published to the Internet or in other circumstances in which you do not have control of normalisation CGJ provides a means for you to prevent unwanted reordering If you are working with specific Bi 10 Mark ordering This section discusses recommended ordering for sequences of consonants with multiple marks This is one of the more important sections of this manual ble passages and are concerned about normalisation reordering of marks you may find it helpful to check the chapter and verse to see what words may be affected in a way that changes the recommended mark order discussed in the following sections of this manual To assist in this we will be producing a document for each Bible book identifying such words These will be available from the SBL website and from http www tiro com resources hebrew in progress Note that not all mark reordering results in broken rendering or textual ambiguity As noted above some rendering engines may cor rect reordering during display further re
25. ngs Because the fonts that supported these encodings tended to be dumb fonts i e without built in layout intelligence often multiple fonts would be needed to correctly display complex texts such as found in Biblical schol arship This of course increased the likelihood that text produced with these encodings could not be reliably and accurately exchanged between systems and applications because correct display relied on not only knowing which encoding standard was used but also which font was used where Unicode and OpenType solve these problems by using a unique code for each Hebrew consonant and mark and employing layout intelligence to map from the encoded characters to the appropriate arrangement of glyphs to display a given text See the examples on the following pages While the benefit of Unicode is easy to see it does require that the SBL Hebrew font be used in a Unicode text encoding environ ment i e in systems and applications that use Unicode character codes when storing manipulating and displaying text No guaran tees can be made about its performance in non Unicode environ ments Note however that some applications will internally map from Unicode characters in a font to 8 bit codes used internally by the application In this case some text may display correctly with the SBL Hebrew font although the text may be subject to the typical exchange problems of 8 bit text It may be that your current docu ment publi
26. of Adobe software includ ing InDesign ME which was used to typeset this manual http www 306 ibm com software globalization icu index jsp International Components for Unicode an open source set of libraries for Unicode support software internationalization and globalization Provides excellent OpenType Layout support http www pango org An open source framework for Unicode text layout and rendering 23
27. or transcribing Dead Sea Scrolls and Judean Desert texts Support for Dead Sea Scrolls transcription is new to the SBL Hebrew 1 50 general release The font supports transcription conventions as employed in numerous works related to both the Dead Sea Scrolls and to other ancient manuscripts from the Judean Desert The en coding for these conventions is as follows amp ring above U 030A amp dot above U 0307 Oo white circle U 25E6 black circle U 2022 strikeout U 0336 x braces U 007B U 007D N brackets U 005B U 005D Example Pwig of Josiwan of JAranna A ty 4nd Jiangs p l It should be noted that there is some discrepancy between how diffferent applications handle display of parenthetical characters such as braces and brackets in bidirectional text layout Care should be taken to check the results when text created in one application is imported into another application it is possible for parentheti cal punctuation to become reversed In general because most of the transcription characters are not explicitly right to left care must be taken in formatting documents correctly setting paragraph direc tionality etc Mostwordprocessingandtextlayoutapplicationshavea strikeou function that provides an easy means to transcribe crossed out let ters without the need to use an additional character code after each letter However use of the combining mark U 0336 enables a plain text distinction to be made which will
28. otherwise as to any matter including without limitation noninfringement of third party rights merchantability integration satisfactory quality or fitness for any particular purpose 8 Neither Tiro Typeworks nor the Society of Biblical Literature accept any li ability for injury death financial loss or damage to person or property includ ing computer hardware software or data resulting from the use of this font software 9 The act of installing this font software on any computer system constitutes acceptance of the terms of this license agreement without exception 20 Appendix B Custom combining classes As explained on pages 8 11 Unicode normalisation may break Biblical Hebrew text by reordering marks that should not be reordered This appendix provides alternate combining classes to use in custom normalisation routines Nota bene these alternate combining classes are outside of any recognised standard and text produced using custom normalisations may still be subject to other normalisations in software beyond the author s control e g web browsers This list is provided purely as a suggestion and no guarantee is made that it will be supported as is in software developed by SBL Tiro Typeworks or any of their project partners See the discussion on pages 8 11 for more information about nor malisation issues and the Unicode Standard for details of standard normalisation and combining classes Below a
29. ou may not redistribute any modified version of the font software either free of charge or for a fee Copies of modified fonts should be submitted to Tiro Typeworks license tiro com and to the Society of Biblical Literature sblexec sbl site org along with any relevant documentation Tiro Typeworks reserves the right to incorporate any such changes into its own fonts 5 You may embed the font software in non commercial electronic documents including but not limited to web pages and e books Font embedding must re spect the embedding bit in the font which must not be changed The embedding bit for this font software is set to Editable Embedding meaning that documents containing this font software may be viewed printed and edited but the embed ded font may not be installed on the recipient user s system 6 All other rights are reserved by Tiro Typeworks except as otherwise designat ed in contract between Tiro Typeworks and the Society of Biblical Literature 7 Neither Tiro Typeworks not the Society of Biblical Literature warrant the per formance or results you may obtain by using this font software Excepting any warranty condition representation or term that cannot or may not be excluded or limited by law applicable to you in your jurisdiction Tiro Typeworks and the Society of Biblical Literature make no warranties conditions representations or terms express or implied whether by statute common law custom usage or
30. pace to which it is applied In the examples below also from Genesis 1 the character sequence is consonant vowel cantillation mark s ZWNJ masora circle Tae a DA pan Note that as shown in the last example from Genesis 1 28 the ZWNJ character can also be used to position a masora circle after a word break at the end of a line 15 Holam male vav haluma This section explains the encoding of the vowel holam male distinct from the consonant plus vowel sequence vav with holam haser Documents using the deprecated conventions of holam vav holam male vav holam vav haluma will need to be updated Nun hafukha This section explains a mechanism for displaying the inverted nun glyph Some texts both manuscript and typographic make a visual dis tinction in the position of the dot between a vav haluma i e vav fol lowed by a holam haser 4 and the independent vowel holam male i Some texts do not make this distinction displaying both as j and some electronic documents may even encode both graphemes the same way relying on the reader s expertise to distinguish them Earlier versions of the SBL Hebrew font used a mark base order ing convention to distinguish holam male and vav haluma but this has been deprecated because the holam male encoding was counter to basic Unicode rules about base mark ordering The correct en coding of this distinction has been the subject of much discussion in
31. re suggested canoni cal combining classes to use in custom normalisation routines for Biblical Hebrew text As in standard normalisation the expectation is that only marks in different combining classes will be reordered during normalisation marks with the same combining class value should not be reordered The lower the combining class value the closer to the base character e g Hebrew consonant the mark should be ordered In this table the recommended combining class is pro vided first then the existing Unicode combining class in grey and then the Unicode codepoint and a descriptive name 10 24 U 5C1 Point Shin Dot 11 25 U 5C2 Point Sin Dot 21 21 U 5BC Point Dagesh or Mapiq 23 23 U 05BF Point Rafe 27 19 U 05B9 Point Holam 27 19 U 05BA Point Holam Haser for Vav 220 220 U 5C5 Lower Punctum 220 220 U 0591 Accent Atnah 220 220 U 5A2 Accent Atnah Hafukh 220 220 U 596 Accent Tipeha 220 220 U 59B Accent Tevir 220 220 U 5A3 Accent Munah 220 220 U 05A4 Accent Mahapakh 220 220 U 5A5 Accent Merkha 220 220 U 5A6 Accent Merkha Kefula 220 220 U 5A7 Accent Darga 220 220 U 5AA Accent Yerah Ben Yomo 220 10 U 5B Point Sheva 220 11 U 5B1 Point Hataf Segol 220 12 U 5B2 Point Hataf Patah 220 13 U 5B3 Point Hataf Qamats 220 14 U 5B4 Point Hirig 220 15 U 5B5 Point Tsere 220 16 U 5B6 Point Segol 220 17 U 5B7
32. ring of marks The form that is of concern for Biblical Hebrew encoding is Normalisation Form C which does reorder marks For more thorough discusion of this example see Tov Emanuall Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible 2nd edition Minneapolis 1992 p43 Here are the Hebrew words from this example enlarged Correct before normalisation DWT Inorrect after normalisation DYWITY Normalisation is achieved by giving every mark a canonical com bining class This is a number that indicates how close to the base character the consonant in the case of Hebrew each mark should be ordered and which marks may be reordered relative to each other Some canonical combining classes contain only individual characters indicating that these can always be reordered relative to characters with different classes some classes contain multiple characters in dicating that these cannot be reordered relative to each other If two or more characters are included in the same class this means that their relative ordering is semantically meaningful and not equiva lent therefore they must not be reordered or the meaning will be lost So far so good but when the Hebrew script was encoded in the Unicode Standard combining classes were assigned in a way that failed to take into account the many peculiarities of Biblical texts This has resulted in every Hebrew vowel being assigned its own ca nonical combining class meaning that combination
33. s of two vowels applied to a single consonant may be reordered during normalisa tion This is not a problem for modern Hebrew spelling but can be disastrous for Biblical texts due to textual conventions such as the tendency to record changing pronunciation by applying new vocali sation but preserving the original consonant structure of words A good and important example is the change in pronunciation of y rusal m to y ru layim which required the Masoretes to add hiriq between the lamed and the final mem in order to approximate the new pronunciation as y rusdlaim while preserving the consonant structure of the ancient manuscripts The final four characters of this word are correctly encoded in the order lamed patah hiriq final mem and the word is correctly displayed DWI however the faulty canonical combining classes for patah and hiriq in Unicode cause hiriq to always precede patah when reordering due to normali sation is applied The resulting sequence lamed hiriq patah final mem is both textually incorrect and cannot be correctly displayed by the SBL Hebrew font Dyw note collision of vowels under lamed Unicode normalisation can easily break Biblical Hebrew text The good news is that most software does not automatically ap ply normalisation and software developers familiar with Biblical Hebrew are likely to be aware of the problem There remains a risk however especially when documents are being exchanged between
34. sequence Mellel will display a small mark above the letters In Microsoft Word on Windows display of control characters is off by default but can be turned on to facilitate editing this behaviour is preferred XeTeX is a typesetting system that marries Donald Knuth s TeX system with Unicode text encoding and OpenType Layout Only a 18 Conclusion small number of users appear to be using this for Biblical Hebrew but the examples they have submitted are impressive and indicate that XeTeX provides some of the best support for Hebrew outside of the Windows version of Word and other Office applications XeTeX makes use of the Icu layout library discussed below Linux As with many other aspects of open source computing the level of support for Biblical Hebrew on Linux depends very much on specific distribution library and application configurations This section of the manual is necessarily short simply because we have limited experience in this area and have only recently begun to ex plore it Users of the SBL Hebrew font who are interested in Hebrew rendering on Linux systems are encouraged to investigate the ICU and Pango two code libraries that provide support for Unicode text processing including OpenType Layout support Tests of current version of Pango compiled into the Firefox web browser show cor rect positioning of single accent to single vowel combinations but errors in second accent and accent to accent relative posit
35. sh tsere zaqef gadol 2 tet dagesh zaqef gadol tsere 3 tet tsere dagesh zaqef gadol 4 tet tsere zagef gadol dagesh 5 tet zagef gadol dagesh tsere ee 6 tet zaqef gadol tsere dagesh The SBL Hebrew font is able to correctly render any of these sequenc es although most users familiar with Hebrew would agree that the dagesh should logically and linguistically precede the vowel and the cantillation mark and most would also agree that the vowel should precede the cantillation mark If you consider that any combina tion of consonant plus three marks can be encoded in six different ways it is easy to realise how even a fairly short word of five or six consonants with all their marks could be encoded in many dozens of different ways Normalisation is important because it provides a mechanism for all these possible permutations of mark ordering to be resolved to a single canonical order This is most important when a text not only needs to be displayed but also needs to searched sorted or spellchecked If a search algorithm had to look for fifty or more possible and equivalent spellings of a single word it would be extremely inefficient and slow So normalisation is applied to reor der every equivalent sequence of characters into a single and con sistent order Note that the Unicode Standard includes multiple normalisation forms i e different ways of normalising text and not all of these involve reorde
36. shing workflow involves non Unicode applications and this will limit for the time being the usefulness of the SBL Hebrew 5 Uniscribe This section explains the role of the Microsoft Unicode Script Processor Uniscribe in shaping complex scripts The most important thing to note in this regard is that different versions of Uniscribe will produce different results for some Hebrew mark sequences Note that applications using text processing calls on systems older than Windows 2000 may not be Uniscribe clients These test documents are also available from http www tiro com resources hebrew font in your work During the past few years Unicode has become the dominant encoding standard for most major operating systems and is for example specified by the World Wide Web consortium as the default encoding of XML documents It is very likely that the makers of your present software will be updating their applications to handle Unicode and they may be able to give you estimates on when suitable upgrades will be available If you are tied to software that is not being updated to handle Unicode soon or if you simply cannot wait and like the design of the SBL Hebrew typeface it may be possible to arrange to have custom fonts made for specific 8 bit encodings or to make your own For information on the kind of modifications that are permitted or for contact information please see the font license in Appendix A page 20 The layout
37. sion of the font is installed you will need to delete that from the Fonts folder before installing the new version The SBL Hebrew font can also be installed on older versions of Windows but because the font uses a pure Unicode encoding not an 8 bit codepage it may not work consistently in all applications It is also possible to install the font on Linux and other open source systems using the FreeType library and on Mac Os x Please see the SBL website for more information Although SBL Hebrew is an OpenType format font it has a ttf file name extension and will display the regular TrueType icon rather than the distinctive OpenType icon The ttf extension allows the font to be recognised on older versions of Windows although these do not support all aspects of Biblical Hebrew text The regular True Type icon is displayed only because the font does not contain a dig ital signature Note that the different icons available for TrueType OT fonts do not indicate anything about the presence or absence of OpenType Layout tables for glyph substitution or positioning both of which are present present in the SBL Hebrew font See pages 4 5 for more information Introduction The font format This section is probably the least essential reading in this manual This section explains the background to the develop ment of the technology used in the SBL Hebrew font and explains exactly what kind of font this is in technical terms For t
38. tly In some applications the marks may not even be centered below the consonant but will cluster between it and the next letter The normalisation issue This section explains an important problem in the encoding of Hebrew in the Unicode Standard This problem will not affect all text but can be a serious problem that users need to be aware of Note that in the two examples rendered by Uniscribe the meteg com bines with the hataf patah forming a mark ligature in which the me teg appears between the two parts of the vowel For more informa tion about this and other aspects of meteg handling see the section of this manual on page 13 Although implementation of the Unicode Standard is generally a boon to scholars working with texts in complex scripts there is an unfortunate and quite serious problem in the current encoding of Hebrew This involves the canonical combining class assignments that are used when text is normalised Normalisation is a process by which sequences of characters in text that can be variously encoded but are semantically identical are treated as identically encoded This can frequently involve the reordering of a sequence of characters Consider as an example this combination of consonant plus marks that occurs in 1 Ch 13 13 This combination could be encoded in six different ways and each would result in exactly the same visual representation and the same semantic meaning for the reader 1 tet dage
39. xtension of the TrueType for mat jointly developed by Microsoft and Adobe Systems An Open Type font has the same table structure as a generic TrueType font but with the option to include a number of additional tables There are two key components to the OpenType extensions PostScript outline data and oT Layout data The first of these determines the flavour of a font that is the kind of outline and rendering tech nology used to paint text As noted above SBL Hebrew is TrueType flavour meaning that it uses the original TrueType outline format and rendering technology rather than PostScript The second key component OpenType Layout data is essential to the correct ren dering of complex scripts like Hebrew and much of this manual is concerned with this technology and how it renders Biblical Hebrew The SBL Hebrew font contains two kinds of OpenType Layout data glyph substitution and glyph positioning These are stored in the OpenType optional tables GsuB and GPOS For more information about the OpenType font format see the specification and other material on the Microsoft or Adobe websites The Microsoft introductory essay Windows Glyph Processing which also discusses other aspects of complex script shaping referred to in this manual might be a good place to start None of this material is 4 Unicode text encoding This section explains in simplified terms what the Unicode Standard is and the implications of this e
40. yph to represent both accents Since this is a new character with some disunification legacy issues the form of the yerah ben yomo character used in many typefaces is actually that of the atnah hafukh support in this version of SBL Hebrew is prelimi nary and subject to review the character code is supported but the glyph is identical to that used for yerah ben yomo The new qamats qatan U 05C7 character makes it possible if de sired to encode an explicit distinction between this vowel short qa mats and the long qamats U 05B8 qamats gadol To visualise this distinction following a convention adopted in some editions the glyph for this new character is noticeably taller than that for qamats gadol 14 Masora Number dot This section explains the use of the upper dot mark in Masoretic notes and for Hebrew numerals For a complete table of Hebrew numerals see R Wonneberger Understanding BHS 1990 See for example Georges Ifrah A universal history of numbers 1998 original French edition 1994 Masora circle handling This section explains how to encode and control the positioning of the masora circle Not to be confused with the high puncta extraordinaria this high dot mark is used primarily in the context of Masoretic notes as in this example from Num 32 24 By pena DRI NTN obavi OY oI MASORA TEXT Like the low puncta extraordinaria the masora number dot is not en coded in the Unicode Standard as
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