Why do the Hebrew Alphabetic Presentation Forms Exist

[Marius Spix]

Unicode also has German s (U+0073) and ſ (U+017F) which are
equivalent, but were used in typesetting for a long time. If you want
to precisely reproduce a historic text, it is required to have
separate ways to encode different glyps. In plaintext documents you
have no influence on OpenType presentation.

But you can use variant selectors, which can be registered
in the IVD database. This would be propably the best way. Technically,
using variant selectors has the same effect as different code points,
as <U+05DC> and <U+05DC U+FE0E> would encode different shapes of the
same character.

It also appears that there are more variants of lamed with special
meanings in the bible:
https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_One/Aleph-Bet/Lamed/lamed.html

Can someone confirm that all variants of lamed have the same numeric
value of 30? If it is different between the variants, that would
qualify for different characters.

We also have special glyph variants of the same character for special
purposes, like an open tail g for IPA (ɡ, U+0261⟩ or an alternative phi
for math (ϕ, U+03D5),  but these are completely optional and have no
different meaning from the closed tail g and the curled phi. As far as
I know linguists and mathematicians accept both glyph variants mutually
interchangeable. I guess, they are only in Unicode for historic reasons.

Regards,

Marius



On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 23:02:44 -0400
"Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> On 6/3/20 10:21 PM, abrahamgross--- via Unicode wrote:
> > This is exactly why I want the folded lamed.
> >
> > (I also want the headless lamed cuz I've also seen it used a lot
> > and I really like it. its especially useful when u need to put a
> > RAFE or other trop/accent marks on a folded lamed)  
> 
> Aha!  So you need it for typesetting reasons!  And that's exactly how 
> you should obtain it.  This is *precisely* why God created OpenType 
> tables in modern fonts!  So that when you have an AYIN with a vowel 
> underneath it, the shape changes so it's flat and not descending as
> much (yes, I know, that's U+FB20 HEBREW LETTER ALTERNATIVE AYIN, but
> that, too, was added for reasons we don't like to admit anymore, and
> it would never be accepted today.)  I know for certain that John
> Hudson's "SBL Hebrew" font does exactly that, see the attached
> image.  Nothing was done between the right frame and the left frame
> aside from typing a QAMATS.  The letter changed automatically,
> because John Hudson has killer typography skillz[sic].  In fact, if I
> had used a PATAH, the letter would _not_ have changed, UNTIL I typed
> a following letter, because a PATAH under an AYIN at the end of a
> word is a patah genuvah, which some prefer to set shifted over to
> right a little.
> 
> I don't know of any font machinery that can actually change things
> based on what's present on the previous *line*; that may not be
> supported. But you can bet that such a thing won't be reason enough
> to encode a new character.
> 
> As for wanting other funky shapes, why, there's nothing to stop you.  
> Just because they're all glyphic variants of the same letter doesn't 
> mean you can't use them both.  You can have stylistic alternatives in
> a font, so THIS "a" is two-story while THAT "a" is one-story, in the
> same font, by using your (higher-level!) formatting software to turn
> options on and off in setting the font.  Look 'em up.
> 
> (A more brute-force method would be to make two copies of the font, 
> FontA and FontB, the same except that one has a bent LAMED and one
> has a straight LAMED.  Then you could change the LAMEDs you want to
> be this way to FontA and the ones you want that way to FontB.)
> 
> (I hope the picture came through.)
> 
> Bottom line: it's not bad to want these things, but this is not the
> way to get them.  There are other tools especially for situations
> like this.
> 
> ~mark
> 
> > 2020/06/03 午後9:44:18 Mark E. Shoulson via
> > Unicode<unicode at unicode.org>:  
> >> The bent LAMED was invented for reasons of typesetting: LAMED is
> >> the only letter with an ascender, and it tended to get in the way
> >> of things with Hebrew text being set with little or no leading and
> >> letter-height filling almost the entire line-height.  You can see
> >> where there are straight LAMEDs on your page, that their ascenders
> >> reach into places in the line above that happen to be open enough
> >> not to cause problems, like spaces between words or letters with
> >> no baseline.  Otherwise, the bent LAMED was pressed into service,
> >> because that's what it's for. 
>