Well, that was precisely the question. Are we talking about a mere preference of visual effect or an actual difference in (original) text--that is, an intended semantic differentiation?
A good question, and one for which I would like to know the answer. I have Unicode text from Libronix, derived from the Westminster Theological Seminary text, that clearly encodes holam_vav distinctly from vav_holam, indicating that someone thought it was important enough a distinction to carefully make during the original WTS transcription. Fonts for this kind of text encoding need complex contextual lookups to prevent the holam from attaching to the preceding consonant. The same fonts will also display the vav_holam encoding correctly, i.e. without a distinction. So from a display perspective, this is one issue that is already solved: the question is one of document encoding and comparison.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
