In addition to these vowel signs, there are three consonant markers: the dagesh, shin and sin dots. Most diacritic marks are vowel signs and all but one of are positioned below the base. Typographic conventions may vary slightly between biblical and modern Hebrew. When they occur, they need to be correctly positioned relative to the base character. In Hebrew, most diacritic marks are optional in most circumstances, and are omitted in most text. A character may have multiple forms of glyphs.ĭiacritic Mark (Nikud) - A combining mark character that is applied to a base character to provide pronunciation guidance. For example the 'א' is the Alef character is U+05D0. The correct position of the cantillation marks is frequently influenced by that of other diacritic marks, and should be be handled contextually by the font.Ĭharacter - Each character represents a Unicode character code point. Layout operations are defined in terms of a base /glyph/, not a base /character/, as a ligature may act as a base glyph.Ĭantillation Mark (Teamin) – A feature of Masoretic Bible text, these marks are positioned above or below a base glyph as a guide to the correct chanting of the text during liturgical worship. The following terms are useful for understanding the layout features and script rules discussed in this document.īase Glyph - Any glyph that can carry one or more combining marks, typically above, below or, in the case of the dagesh mark, within the base glyph shape. In addition to being a primer and specification for the creation and support of Hebrew fonts, this document is intended to more broadly illustrate the OpenType Layout architecture, feature schemes, and operating system support for shaping and positioning text. This document also presents information about the Hebrew OpenType shaping engine of Uniscribe, the Windows component responsible for text layout. Registered features of the Hebrew script are defined and illustrated, encodings are listed, and templates are included for compiling Hebrew layout tables for OpenType fonts. In this specification, font developers will learn how to encode complex script features in their fonts, choose character sets, organize font information, and use existing tools to produce Hebrew fonts. This document presents information that will help font developers create or support OpenType fonts for all Hebrew script languages covered by the Unicode Standard.

Hebrew font dafont