Hello -

Context:
As a packaging designer, my clients are often requesting that we add Arabic, Chinese and Hebrew texts on packaging.
More often than not, I receive 4 different types of text sources :

— 1.
A .PDF containing a scan of the text needed (so nothing more than a picture).

— 2.
A .PDF whereby I can select the text and copy it into MS Word® but the sentence is no longer the same as what I had copied from the .PDF file! (e.g. some of the characters are replaced by strange ones).

— 3.
A .PDF file where the client has inserted an annotation which displays correctly in the Acrobat® but the moment that I do a copy/paste into MS Word®, the whole sentence is inversed (text appearing left to right instead of right to left -> For Arabic).

— 4.

Good evening ladies and gents.

To keep it short, I've been working on this typeface for a while and I would be thankful to receive some feedback on it. It's condensed, and the idea came from that cryptic text at the bottom of movie posters that nobody ever reads. Except its purpose is not to be entirely invisible and that the design took many many turns since then.

I realize it looks a bit like URW Grotesk Condensed, although I was actually unaware of that until recently.

So far, I really feel I'm not doing this font a lot of justice - in that, it is too plain, too boring, and has little personality. Or maybe I've just been looking at it for too long. Oh and I made a tz ligature, just because I think it's pretty.

Anyway, here it is:

Shalom,

I'm looking for some literature on the subject. The development of the alphabet, different typographic (and calligraphic) styles and the likes.

Any "must have" books? Books you'd recommend in general?

thanks.

This is treatment I did of 18th century Armenian calligraphic style. Its the first letter of Armenian Alphabet - AIB (alpha, alef).

Dear Admin, I would also propose to create a Armenian Letters sub-forum in Special Interest Groups. I am sure that there are quite many Armenian font designers who are here and would join. Hrant Papazian is at least one of them I know :)

So I'm starting on my first serious Hebrew companion to a font in the works. I'm far from professional or even good, I'd say. Either way, I found that resources about Hebrew text are very rare, and while I could fine plenty of resources about latin character design, I find myself doing mostly guesswork when it comes to Hebrew.

So I managed to figure out a lot of things by myself just from looking at how existing known fonts look: shin connects to the left side, samech is kind of like a lowercase sigma as opposed to final mem, and so forth. But still, I know virtually nothing besides.

Hello,

I'm looking for a Bold Condensed / Compressed that matches "Solano" only with Hebrew Characters?

Does anyone know where to head to?

Thank you

Alex

I have just released the Hebrew Font Shuneet Version 2.0
which now includes a family of different weights. These are Shuneet Light, Shuneet Thin, Shuneet Book, Shuneet Normal, Shuneet Demi and Shuneet Heavy. Each has a matching set of Latin and numeric characters.

There has been some discussion in this forum as to what 'matching' should mean in this context. I take it to mean that a block of Hebrew text and a block of English text should look well together. Also foreign words or sentences embedded in a block of Hebrew text should not detract from the appearance of the Hebrew.

An interesting 'discovery'...

The letters alef and lamed can form a ligature. That said, a combination of two characters - alef & lamed. What about one character..... an upside-down.... final pe?

See this old siddur:

A district court in Israel held that the inclusion of Guttman Keren in the Office suite violated the plaintiffs' rights in the font Koren, designed by Eliyahu Koren.

The (interesting) decision in Hebrew can be found here: http://www.psakdin.co.il/kAnnex/nws_nllb_1.pdf

I'm designing a blog for a theologian, which means he'll be occasionally writing in (biblical) Hebrew and Greek. If possible I'd like to steer off the beaten path and use a webfont. Do you know of any webfonts that offer this kind of language support?

[I initially thought of Gentium, which would be a great choice, but the webfont version only includes the Latin alphabet.]

Thanks in advance for your help.

EDIT: just noticed Gentium does indeed include WOFF files for Gentium Plus, but I'm trying my best to avoid self-hosting the files. Still, I guess there's my first typeface for the list. Any others?

Hi,

Can anyone help find a hebrew font that looks most like KarnakPro-Bold

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/redrooster/karnak-pro/bold/

this is for a translation of the site: http://test.wegetmore.com to hebrew.

thanks,

I’ve been working on a family of multiscript monospaced bitmap screen fonts, and I’d appreciate your comments.

Some remarks in advance:

Could you guys critique my school research project?
I modulated the Hebrew type over the Western type system, using the Minion Pro as basic typeface.
Hope you like it.

Enjoy :)

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Western-Hebrew/1591909

I am typesetting a thesis with Berthold Walbaum for the main text (and AkzidenzGrotesk for the titles). I need to add some greek and hebrew words in it. For the greek font, I noticed the output was not very good until I switched to some didone greek font (GFS-bodoni). Now I want to do the same thing with some hebrew words. I am aware that I can't really expect some didone-hebrew font, but maybe some very "stable" hebrew font would have some better look that some other. Any hint?

hello,
i would be very glad if you have a recomendation for an arabic font that will suite to the other hebrew (progtextGOLD by Fontype) and english font (ST. Ryde by Sascha Timplan).
(macintosh offcourse).

Hi all,
Does anybody already saw this display bug in FontLab ?
All the texts you can type in FontLab like values or sample text in metrics window or somewhere else are not displayed in latin characters but in a kind of hebrew or something like that. A bit annoying to be precise !
I already had this bug in iTunes, but this disapeared at the next update.
I tried to reinstall FontLab totally but without succes.
Thanks by advance for the help.

mr

This post describes how I have created matching Hebrew and Latin for my own font "Mike Hebrew".

I did not add this post to the "Creating a Merger of a Latin and a Non-Latin Font Style" because many of the replies did not deal with designing fonts. Furthermore don't want to be involved in criticizing other people's fonts, other people or to argue about history etc.

This design problem will be different for each kind of Hebrew font. If the Hebrew font is Frank Ruel then the solutions will be quite different to solutions that would be appropriate if the Hebrew font is Levenim. The is NO SINGLE SOLUTION.

What I write here only applies to matching the Hebrew and the Latin letters in my own "Mike Hebrew" font.

I'm looking for an English typeset compatible to the Hebrew typeset Monotype Hadassah (which can be seen here and here)

Thanks!

I have a couple of unrelated type questions:

1. What is the reasoning for having ascenders exceed caps height, is it just a style or does it help when reading small copy or large bodies of text?

2. When developing a sans inspired Hebrew character set, is there any reason to develop an italic set as well? From what I understand, Hebrew has no true italics, but are italics used with any frequency in modern day text settings using Hebrew?

3. What's the reasoning behind some Small Caps exceeding x height is it just preference depending on the dimensions of they typeface or is it just about aesthetics?

I found this at a relative's house: a bound manuscript, text probably written in the 18th century, containing some Christian prayers in Hebrew and the text of Psalms. Looks to have been written by a Jesuit missionary, probably as an exercise in learning biblical Hebrew. As a specimen of calligraphy it's pretty abysmal, but it gives interesting insight into an outsider's perception of the Hebrew alphabet. The way the author (or possibly authors) structure the letters is often different from what I grew up with. Note especially the Mem, Shin, Tet and Pey. Some of the characters (the Mem especially) afforded me a minor epiphany or two about their typographic forms vs. handwritten.

Hello everyone,

I am in need of your suggestions.

A little background is needed: the University where I work and study is using the Angel LMS. The biblical language professors are trying to find a font that could be standardized for both Hebrew and Greek.*

What are our options, considering the following requirements:

• Unicode
• Must have support for Greek & Hebrew (must point correctly in Hebrew)
• License: something that would allow us to upload to our own server and distribute to registered students only** / or system font (cross-platform compliant)

*They're open to using separate fonts for Hebrew / Greek if needed.
[EDIT] ** Through a secure LMS.

I'd appreciate your help.

Dan

I'm interested in learning to do traditional Hebrew calligraphy. Does anyone know where I might go for that in New York?

Well I have at last got around to designing a Latin character set for Mike Hebrew.
I have put an example of Mike Hebrew Regular on the Critique forum.

http://typophile.com/node/65840

Please pull no punches!
Mike

The Mike Hebrew font family has a set of Latin characters. Getting the Hebrew and Latin to match is not at all straightforward indeed Latin and Hebrew are incompatible in both metrics and style.

At first I took Tuffy for the Latin with few modifications but now I'm attempting to design a new Latin alphabet.

Here is an example. My goal is that the Latin should be unobtrusive in its secondary role. Please help me get a good set of Latin characters.

PLEASE CRITICIZE THE LATIN ALPHABET.