is it possible to change the Hebrew font?

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi Fabian,

 

We discussed it at https://forums.accordancebible.com/topic/25575-furtive-pathach-displayed-as-regular-pathach/?tab=comments#comment-125979 .

 

Logos does not have problems with fp, whereas Acc does. Just check my examples from LB19.

 

Michel

[Benjamin Denckla]

IMO the bottom line is there were fairly serious mistakes made in how Unicode Hebrew was defined, and these mistakes make it hard, but not impossible, to make a good font for Biblical Hebrew. I suspect the Accordance Unicode font does a pretty good job, but not as good a job as non-Unicode Accordance Yehudit does when given the Bible in Yehudit's custom (i.e. non-Unicode) encoding.

 

In other words I suspect Yehudit's custom encoding is better than Unicode, where in this context "better" means "makes it easier to make a font for."

 

However regrettable for some users, it makes sense to me that Accordance would not prioritize moving to a Unicode representation of its Hebrew Bibles just so fonts other than Yehudit could be used.

 

Accordance seems to do a pretty good job of converting to Unicode for copy & paste purposes. This makes use of other fonts possible when you leave Accordance, which may be the most common use case for Unicode fonts applied to Accordance-origin text.

 

Those who would like to use Unicode fonts inside Accordance may well be in such a minority that their feature request is unlikely to be honored any time soon, if ever.

[A.D. Riddle]

I strongly support Unicode conversion. The ability to select a different font seems pretty basic in the digital world.

 

A.D.

[Benjamin Denckla]

What if we flipped this on its head and instead changed the "ask" to be that Accordance create a version of SBL Hebrew that accepts Yehudit encoding? (Of course it would have to first be determined that doing this would not run afoul of SBL Hebrew's license.)

 

And same for any other fonts of interest other than SBL Hebrew. AFAIK this would only be Ezra SIL, Ezra SIL SR, and perhaps one or more fonts by Yoram Gnat (of blessed memory) like Taamey Frank. (I think Ezra SIL SR is very similar to Yehudit so perhaps that one would not add much value though.)

 

Then again, perhaps converting these fonts to accept Yehudit encoding is not so simple.

 

And unlike changing Accordance to support any Unicode font, the font-conversion solution doesn't "scale." E.g. if a new font of interest comes along, the conversion work would have to be done all over again on that font.

 

Anyway, just an idea. Sometimes it is possible to get trapped thinking of only one type of solution to a problem, or only one way of framing a problem.

 

If the problem is reframed in the very limited way that "some users want Hebrew inside Accordance to look as if it is in SBL Hebrew," then this conversion idea might have legs.

 

If we stick with "some users want to be able to use any Unicode font for Biblical Hebrew inside Accordance," then this conversion idea lacks legs.  

[Fabian]

1 hour ago, A.D. Riddle said:

I strongly support Unicode conversion. The ability to select a different font seems pretty basic in the digital world.

 

A.D.

Unfortunately unicode is still slower than the Yehudit or Helena font.