Questions about Hebrew fonts

[Dov Grobgeld]

Hi Kenneth,

The main issue here is not the fonts, but whether your text is in logical
order or visual order, according to the unicode bidirectional algorithm.
See:

https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/

It is correct that if your output is pdf like, then there is no meaning of
left-to-right, or right-to-left, (unless the user wants to highlight a
section of text from your PDF file and do copy and paste).

However, for a freeflow text format like the Kindle, where the user can
choose the font size, the application must be able to reflow the text, and
to do that correctly it must apply the Bidi algorithm on the text. I assume
this is the meaning of "not being able to handle Hebrew characters", they
really mean that they don't support the Bidi algorithm.

I know that there are a number of EPub readers that are bidi aware, but
that is probably not of much help to you.

I hope this helps.

Regards,


On Wed, Jun 14, 2023 at 6:27 AM kenneth greifer via Unicode <
unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> Hi. I know nothing about unicode or fonts or anything about this subject
> or computers at all, but I just wanted to ask people a few questions about
> computers and Hebrew fonts. I might not even understand your answer, if you
> choose to answer me, but I still want to ask because this issue has
> bothered me for many years, and I recently decided to try to look up people
> to ask about it.
>
> When I use Hebrew fonts in a word processor called Wordperfect, and then I
> publish to PDF, it often reverses the order of the letters. For some
> reason, when I change the English font I use, it makes it possible for the
> Hebrew font to type left to right like English, so I type Hebrew words from
> the end of the word to the beginning. Even though it is strange, for some
> reason, the PDF version has the letters in the right order and does not
> reverse the letters.
>
> When I try to self-publish some of my work on Amazon KDP, which is Kindle,
> they say that Kindle ebook readers can't handle Hebrew characters. I would
> like to know if there exists a left to right version of fonts for languages
> that are written right to left like Hebrew. If there were left to right
> versions of these fonts, then people could have an easier time mixing
> Hebrew and English or other languages in books on ebook readers. Of course,
> they would have to type the words in reverse order, which can be confusing,
> but it would make life easier in other ways.
>
> I hope this question is ok for this list. I don't plan to really ask
> anything else, except maybe how to get fonts like this to exist if they
> don't currently exist. Thanks for your time.
>
> Kenneth Greifer
>
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