We've been discussing this font and related family members a bit on the UYIP mailing list, of which I'm moderator. (Web site: http://uyip.org)
I said I thought the quality of these fonts for Hebrew was rather high (modulo these issues). Raphael Finkel, creator of the "Yiddish Typewriter" website (http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html) and author of several Yiddish fonts, had some praise, but also some criticism. I'm sharing them with you with his permission: I looked at FreeSans.ttf with fontforge. It uses neither kerning nor anchors, at least for the Hebrew component. (It does use anchors for other components.) Instead, it plays a nasty trick: it sets the width of the vowels to 0 (they stick out far to the right of the left=right border). That means that you won't necessarily get the proper kerning for all combinations. pasekh-daled, for instance, should have the pasekh under the stroke of the daled, but pasekh-he should have it centered under the letter. In fact, khirik-yud places the khirik too far to the right, and pasekh-tsvey-yudn has the pasekh too far to the right. The fact that anchors are not used also means that the khirik is not raised when placed under a yud; a pasekh is not raised under a tsvey-yudn. However, the pre-composed versions of these combinations have proper positioning, so software that converts combinations to their pre-composed (ligature) forms presents them nicely. (gedit does not) So I would consider this only a medium-quality font as far as Hebrew/Yiddish nekudes are concerned. But the letters are quite attractive. Note: pasekh = Unicode PATAH (U+05B7) khirik = HIRIQ (U+05B4) khirik-yud = YOD + HIRIQ (U+05D9 + U+05B4) pasekh-tsvey-yudn = DOUBLE-YOD + PATAH (U+05F2 + U+05B7) pasekh-daled = DALET + PATAH (U+05D3 + U+05B7) pasekh-he = HE + PATAH (U+05D4 + U+05B7) Based on my own visual inspection, I notice that there are several problems with the placement of diacritics ("nikudes"), from acceptable but just a bit off in most cases to very far off and unacceptable. I'll have to delay making a more detailed report or several reports about that, but hopefully I will do it soon. Regarding the part about khirik-yud and pasekh-tsvey-yudn, these apply strictly to Yiddish. When I objected about this to Raphael, he clarified this further: It has become standard in printed Yiddish to raise the khirik and pasekh under yud or yudn. You are right; in Hebrew it would look strange. So this is kind of a fine point. It's acceptable not to do this even for Yiddish, especially for a general Hebrew font. It would be ideal to do with "language sensitivity", i.e., if there's a way to generate different glyphs based on language, e.g., Yiddish vs. Hebrew. But I don't know if the the truetype or opentype font technologies and related rendering systems even allow for this. Anyhow, all in all, I think these fonts are very promising. They're quite usable for everyday Hebrew (no use of diacritics), and mostly usable with Yiddish after a problem or two I'll soon report gets fixed (extremely limited use of diacritics), and somewhat usable for Hebrew with vowels (extremely heavy use of diacritics). I look forward to sending more bug reports, and thanks for your work so far and interest in making improvements. Regards, Mark ----- Original message ----- From: "Steve White" <stevan.wh...@googlemail.com> To: "Mark H. David" <m...@yv.org> Cc: freefont-bugs@gnu.org Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:24:06 +0100 Subject: Re: [Freefont-bugs] bug #25887: FreeSans Hebrew most nonspacing marks are spacing Mark, I responded to the bug report. In order to see the progress of a bug, either make a proper Savannah account and submit the bug as that user, or I can attach your e-mail address to bug reports. So...in your report, you said at first there was a problem with FreeSans, and then that recent versions do not have the problem (thanks for noticing! I think you're the first to write in about that!) But I don't know how you feel about the current state. If you see further specific problems, please don't hesitate to file a bug report. We do our best to attend to them promptly. Also: I think the Hebrew range in FreeSerif is a mess (although I spent a lot of time trying to improve it). I think the glyphs didn't even originate from the same font. The roman and bold are definately not in accord. Furthermore, I don't think the current letters fit the rest of FreeFont very well. So...I mean to replace the whole thing. I've just been busy. Cheers! On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Mark H. David <m...@yv.org> wrote: > I submitted and gave an update on this bug: > > bug #25887: FreeSans Hebrew most nonspacing marks are spacing > > Could someone take a look at it and maybe comment? > I just joined this list, so comment in the bug or here. > > Thanks, > > Mark