Questions about Hebrew fonts

[Giacomo Catenazzi]

On 14 Jun 2023 04:29, kenneth greifer via Unicode wrote:
> 
> 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.

You are proposing just hacks, which were good in 1970 (limited 
resources), but not now (nor a decade ago). Hebrew is written right to 
left, but it doesn't matter. We write text from beginning to the end, 
from first letter to the last. Unicode uses such convention, and it is 
good to keep it so. Your proposal is just an hack and it doesn't solve 
really the problem. The problem must be solved on the rendering side 
(display), and it is almost solved.

So I expect your tools are not designed for such languages. I'm sure 
ebooks exists also in Hebrew (and they mix text with different 
conventions, think about numbers), so it is not a problem of technology. 
PDF can handle most of languages. So fix your tools! I think your tools 
are made just for Latin scripts (and maybe just for English), so to 
solve just the author's problem. I expect your tool cannot understand 
scripts (and so using e.g. Unicode algorithms to find the direction of 
the script, and to instruct it on PDF code).

Think about your hack. Now many ebook readers can read text (read as 
"speaking aloud the text"), so they must know the order of characters 
(which it is independent to the order of display). In your case, 
programmers should add an hack for that (and all complexities on search 
functions, googling, etc.). Is it better to fix the tools to inject code 
to tell direction of text?

It is really a problem of your tools, not of PDF (or HTML) or most 
technologies made to render text.

ciao
	cate