Hebreeuws

Shaloold, Shaloscr leveren pfb-files voor Hebreeuws en Torah idem maar dan in ttf-formaat.

De auteur van de beide Shalom fonts is Jonathan Brecher, 9 Skyview Road, Lexington, MA 02173-1112 USA.

I made this font. If you mess with it or claim it as your own, I'm going to be very upset. All rights reserved, and assorted other legal stuff.

ShalomOldStyle was created with Fontographer 3.0.5 and revised with Fontographer 3.5.1 on a Macintosh SE. It is a Type 1 font and works well with Adobe Type Manager (ATM). Versions are available for the Macintosh, for the NeXT, and in an assortment of flavors for use on UN*X machines, at present, and may become available on other platforms in the future.

Look also for my related fonts, ShalomStick and ShalomScript. ShalomOldStyle and ShalomStick have EXACTLY the same character widths and character mapping. ShalomScript, however, has some characters with different widths and requires different vowels for some letters.

Keyboard mapping

Because this font is not suitable for creating long Hebrew documents, I've decided not to use the 'official' Hebrew keyboard mapping. (This may change if I get many requests to do so, but so far I've had few.) Instead, I've done my best to map the Hebrew alphabet to the qwerty keyboard. The aleph, bet, gimel, daled, hay, vav, zayin, chet, yod, kaf, lamed, mem, nun, samach, ayin, pey, qoph, resh, and tav are transliterated to the a, b, g, d, h, v, z, c, y, k, l, m, n, s, i, p, q, r, and t respectively. The tet and tzadi are on the e and x because I don't have a better place to put them. Final forms of the kaf, mem, nun, pey, and tzadi are on the shifted equivalent (K, M, N, P, X) The shin (without a dot) is on the w because the shape is similar, while the shin and sin with dots are on the D and S, respectively.

Several exclusively Yiddish characters and combinations of characters are also provided, but in general there is no logic to the placement of these characters. A pasakh alef and a komets alef are on the A and Z keys. The tsvey vovn and vov yud are on the B and G keys. A khirik yud, tsvey yudn, and a pasakh tsvey yudn may be found on F, H, and u. All of these characters except for the pasakh tsvey yudn may be produced with other characters or combinations of characters, however, the double-character keys have a slightly closer spacing between the pair. The center dot (dagesh) for the bet, kaf, pey, etc. may be placed by typing a < after (to the right of) the letter. The > key will also provide a dagesh, but at a slightly different offset for the nun. A dgaesh for the yud may be produced with the f key.

The vowels are pretty much strung along the number keys:

1: cheereek
2: tzayray
3: segol
4: sh'va
5: koobootz
6: chataf segol
7: chataf patach
8: chataf kamatz
9: high sh'va (9) and high kamatz (shift-9) both used only with final chaf
-: patach
=: kamatz

ShalomOldStyle characters come in one of three widths, and since Hebrew likes its vowels centered under the letters, there must be three corresponding sets of vowels. Most letters take the vowels produced by the keys listed above (1,2,3, etc.). The narrow letters (gimel, vav, zayin, yod, nun) use shifted numbers (!,@,#, etc.). The wide shin must use a third set of vowels (Q,W,E, etc.) where the appropriate key is shifted down one row on the keyboard and slightly to the right. In all cases the vowel must be typed after (to the right of) the consonant under which it will go. Of course, you are free to use only one set of vowels for all characters, but it won't look as good. For the techie types out there, the vowels all have zero width and negative offset. This makes editing the vowels extremely difficult, but there really was no other option.

If you plan on using this font, I STRONGLY recommend printing out the cheat sheet that is distributed with it.

The above, of course, refers only to the vowels which go below consonants; the cholam and shoorook may also be created. A full cholam may be produced by typing an o, while a cholam without a vav may be produced with O (shift-o). A shoorook may be created by typing V. All three of these vowels, including the cholam without a vav, are treated as separate characters in this font. They should all be typed BEFORE (to the left of) the appropriate consonant.

There are, in addition, several other characters available. A high connecting bar is produced with the tilde ( ). An overbar, which is used in Yiddish, may be produced with the ) key. The lowercase and capital j produce short and long dashes, while the L key yields an ellipsis. The grave (`) key produces a low (opening) quote, a capital C yields a low (opening) single quote (or alternate comma), and the vertical bar (|) will produce an exclamation point. The locations of these characters are the result of trying to fit as many things as possible into logical locations on the keyboard. Inevitably, some do not end up on logical positions. Oh, well.

The period, comma, semicolon, colon, slash, backslash, single quote, double quote, opening and closing brackets, and question mark are all in their expected locations.

I hope you find this font useful.

Het Torah Sofer font is gemaakt door Howard M. Berlin, PO Box 9431, Wilmington, DE 19809, USA.

The keyboard mapping of most of the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to its English sound-alike letter. All 27 letters of the alphabet and 3 of the 4 punctuation marks are typed using lower-case letters only.

                Lower   3-Digit
        Hebrew  Case    ANSI
        Letter  Key     Code

a       Aleph    a      097
b       Bet      b      098
g       Gimel    g      103
d       Daled    d      100
h       Heh      e      101
v       Vav      v      118
z       Zayin    z      122
x       Cheth    x      120
u       Teth     u      117
y       Yod      y      121
k       Chaph    k      107
;       Chaph-final     ;       059
l       Lamed    l      108
m       Mem      m      109
,       Mem-final        ,      044
n       Nun      n      110
]       Nun-final        ]      093
c       Samekh   c      099
i       Ayin     i      105
p       Peh      p      112
[       Peh-final        [      091
o       Tsadi    o      111
/       Tsadi-final       /     047
q       Koph     q      113
r       Resh      r     114
s       Shin      s     115
t       Tav       t     116

Although there are no written punctuation marks in scriptural Hebrew as is written in the Torah, the following punctuation are provided in Torah Sofer for those purposes such as designing wedding or bar mitzvah announcements, brit millah (circumcision), ketubah (marriage agreement), pidyon ha'ben (redemption of the first born) documents, table place cards, etc.

                3-Digit
                ANSI
        Key     Code
.       .       046
'       '       039
"       " (shift ')     034
=       =       061

The . mark (soph-pasuk) is equivalent to a period. The = mark (makkeph) is used for hyphenated words (e.g. ynp=li). The single prime (') and double prime (") marks are used in modern Hebrew to indicate abbreviations.