Not the online blog site, but the program itself. My other source of frustration is was with WordPress. PC users: can you see John’s Hebrew texts in SBL Hebrew with the vowels in correct alignment? What browser are you using? What about it, Mac users? What are you experiencing? Will Firefox ever support fonts like SBL Hebrew correctly? What is your browser of choice? The frustrating thing is that Safari WILL display the font and pointing correctly, so it CAN be done! Even on my iPhone (which, to date, cannot handle SBL Hebrew), I can view John Hobbins’ post with vowel pointing correctly lining up. There is some discussion about implementing it in Firefox here, but I would guess it will be a while. As such, it will be quite some time before it is widely implemented.
The major drawback of Core Text is that it is very new and only available in Leopard. If you paste (or type) Hebrew text with SBL Hebrew in it, the layout is generally correct. You can see the advantages of this API, which does support OpenType layout tables, in TextEdit. There is however, a newer technology called Core Text that does the layouts correctly. The older technology, ATSUI, does not provide support for complex layouts of OpenType fonts like SBL Hebrew, so one is left with the garbled mess that you now see. This has to do with the technologies that OS X uses to render text. Like Safari, however, even Firefox 3 does not position the vowels and diacritics correctly. Firefox 3, of which there is a publicly available beta, does support the font, and it will display the page you linked in SBL Hebrew. Firefox 2 will almost assuredly never support fonts like SBL Hebrew. The font rendering technology cannot deal with the font, and so it ignores the font (Microsoft Office does the same thing). Last year, when I was first trying to track down the problem, I received this answer to my post on the Fontlab forum (remember, this was posted 5/2008, hence the references to Firefox 3 as beta): Here’s a link to a recent post, and here’s what I’m seeing (this is a screen capture): Nevertheless, things like John Hobbins’ blog often do not look the way they should. I’ve got my various preferences set correctly (at least I am pretty sure I do). What I’m perplexed by is the sometimes funky way that Firefox (3.5.5) and OS X (10.6.1) render the SBL Hebrew font vowel pointing. Now, if someone wanted to send me a version of ME CS4 to review… I’ve come to accept (after a great deal of weeping and gnashing followed by much counseling) that unless I am willing to shell out hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the Middle East version of Adobe’s Creative Suite, I will have to use workarounds for Hebrew in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Scrivener does a decent job handling the mix of R->L and L->R text that I create. I use Mellel for wordprocessing most of the time. I am pretty good at getting my Hebrew fonts to play nice on my computer.
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