Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

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markjulie
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Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by markjulie »

I am copying and pasting Biblical Hebrew text from BHS / WTT into Mellel 3.3.8b3 on OS X 10.10.3 using SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL fonts. The daghes shifts left or right up to one half character width in its related character sometimes getting lost entirely to the reader. The behavior is persistent onscreen, when exporting to pdf, and when printing. I have applied different Hebrew fonts and styles to no avail.

It does not affect holem, sureq, hire, or single pointing above or below letters nor more complicated pointing.

I can workaround with the same fonts if I copy and paste into Adobe Acrobat.
jannuss
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by jannuss »

Strange
I use Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew because both fonts correct problems with diacritics found in many biblical text sources.

I suspect the problem may be in the source material itself.
Have you tried getting the texts from Machon Mamre?

Can you send us an example of the problem?

Note: I've had a similar issue with texts copied from some on-line SIDDUR sites. All the text copies correctly except for the HOLEM marks which simply disappear.

Janet
farcas
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by farcas »

I have similar problem with misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text regardless of what font I put it in. All unicode. Times New Roman or Ezra SIL. SBL Translit actually looked good. But everything shifts.

Here's the text:

Jer 46:10
וְֽהַיּ֨וֹם הַה֜וּא לַאדֹנָ֧י יְהוִ֣ה צְבָא֗וֹת י֤וֹם נְקָמָה֙ לְהִנָּקֵ֣ם מִצָּרָ֔יו וְאָכְלָ֥ה חֶ֙רֶב֙ וְשָׂ֣בְעָ֔ה וְרָוְתָ֖ה מִדָּמָ֑ם כִּ֣י זֶ֠בַח לַאדֹנָ֨י יְהוִ֧ה צְבָא֛וֹת בְּאֶ֥רֶץ צָפ֖וֹן אֶל־נְהַר־פְּרָֽת


Any help would be great. Thanks!
rpcameron
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by rpcameron »

What about any of the Culmus fonts?

More on topic, the reason the diacritics would misalign is because of improper anchor points in the font itself. It may also have to do whether internally the fonts are TrueType or Postscript; OpenType fonts allow the fonts to be encoded as either.
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jannuss
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by jannuss »

farcas wrote:I have similar problem with misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text regardless of what font I put it in. All unicode. Times New Roman or Ezra SIL. SBL Translit actually looked good. But everything shifts.
Fracas,

1. First thing: never,never, never use Times NewRoman with Right-to-Left fonts.
There are no end of versions of this font available. Some have RtL bugs and some don't.
More than half the RtL problems people report on this forum end up being caused by Times New Roman.

2. I copied the Jeremiah passage into Ezra SIL and it did indeed have a few problems with some letters that carry two or three marks. For example, the NUN in L'HINAKAIM. Ezra SIL SR did a slightly better job.

3. No problems here with SBL Hebrew. .

4. Finally, I copied the verse from Machon Mamre and put that version in both Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew -- both came out just fine.

So, I conclude your problem is with your source material, not the fonts.

Janet
farcas
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by farcas »

Janet: Thanks! SBL Hebrew works much better. SBL BibLit does even better with subtle shifts in the diacritics.


Thanks for the pointers!
jannuss
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by jannuss »

farcas wrote:Janet: Thanks! SBL Hebrew works much better. SBL BibLit does even better with subtle shifts in the diacritics.
Glad this is working out for you
but
from what i cans, the Hebrew implementation of SBL BibLit and SBL Hebrew are identical.

Janet
farcas
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Re: Misalignment of diacritics in Hebrew text

Post by farcas »

Ya. They're virtually the same. Though I vaguely remember testing them and seeing slight differences and ended up preferring SBL Hebrew.

Again, wicked thanks. I should have known better!
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