unicode font for judeo-arabic
Moshe Taube
Is there a unicode font for Judeo-Arabic available somewhere?
I've been using for years the HEIS Judeo-Arabic font which Ofra
Tirosh Becker was kind enough to share with me (and I assume with
others), but now with the different new Operating Systems an word-
processors, Unicode seems to be de rigueur.
thanks,
Moshe
Tsuguya Sasaki
I don't think there is a Unicode font only for Judeo-Arabic, but there
are a couple of freely available fonts for Unicode Arabic Range.
Scheherazade and Lateef are two of them:
http://scripts.sil.org/ArabicFonts
I don't know which special characters and diacritics you need for
Judeo-Arabic, but if you don't find them in these fonts, that means that
they are not part of Unicode. If you can let me know what they are, I
can check for you if they are included in the above fonts.
You can also check this by yourself, e.g. with UnicodeChecker for Mac OS
X, which you seem to be using:
http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/
And if you have to type frequently those characters and diacritics that
are not on the standard Arabic keyboard, you may want to customize it
and assign keys to them, e.g. with Ukelele for Mac OS X:
http://scripts.sil.org/ukelele
By the way, the above fonts are also recommendable for Windows users who
have to add diacritics, because all the Arabic fonts preinstalled on
Windows, including Times New Roman, Tahoma, Simplified Arabic and
Traditional Arabic, are buggy in combining characters and certain
diacritics.
--
Tsuguya Sasaki / Tsvi Sadan
http://www.ts-cyberia.net/
Tamas Biro
>> Is there a unicode font for Judeo-Arabic available somewhere? I've
>> been using for years the HEIS Judeo-Arabic font which Ofra Tirosh
>> Becker was kind enough to share with me (and I assume with others),
>> but now with the different new Operating Systems an word-processors,
>> Unicode seems to be de rigueur.
Hello,
I can imagine that this is not the simplest solution, but you may want to
try out the IPA Console of the TDS project:
http://languagelink.let.uu.nl/tds/ipa/index.html
It is Java-based, so you can use it on any platform, any operating system
(Windows, Mac, Unix,...). It has been deviced primarily to enter Unicode
IPA characters (to copy-paste them to any application you are using), so
if not to you, this feature still may be interesting to other people in
this emailing list.
But there is also an option to define your own special characters. So
it should be also possible to define among others Judeo-Arabic characters
(do you mean Hebrew characters with dots on the top, etc.?), based on the
Unicode of the Hebrew or Arabic characters.
Good luck with it,
Best,
Tamas
___________________________________
* Biro Tamas: bi...@nytud.hu
* bi...@birot.hu
* http://www.birot.hu
rdhob...@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
The dot on top of Hebrew letters (Unicode 05C4 "Hebrew mark upper dot", in the Hebrew Extended range) works nicely in the font Ezra SIL, available free from http://scripts.sil.org/EzraSIL_Home. Surprisingly, it does not seem to work (on my Windows XP system) in SBL Hebrew, which otherwise handles the vowels and ta`amim very nicely, though it is appears in the font display in MS Word when I use the Insert -- Symbol menu. It does work in Arial Unicode, which is, however, pretty ugly.
Unicode 0307 "Combining Dot Above", in the Combining Diacritical Marks range, works very well in both Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew (available free from http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/biblicalfonts.aspx), as does the rafe sign.
I don't know what other symbols might be needed. And if you're looking for a font style that resembles Mizrahi-script in appearance, I also have no idea.
Bob
