REQ: Installers for the Open Siddur open-source Unicode Hebrew font pack

[Aharon Varady]

I updated the Open Siddur Project's open-source Unicode Hebrew font pack to version 1.17 today, mainly to add a few new fonts. http://opensiddur.org/tools/fonts/

Our help pages for typing, editing, and displaying Hebrew are very popular pages on opensiddur.org and the Hebrew fonts page is the most popular on the site. Many people come to down the font pack.

Sometimes I think that besides introducing the idea of open content licensed siddurim to the world, our most important contribution is making available this font pack, gratis. I want to live in a world where I don't have to receive a text source sheet in David or Frank type. And I want future documents to be preserved in Unicode, a future-proof open standard encoding format.

I have several pipe-dream, wish-list projects that I think would help to realize this future:

1) I'd like people to be able to download LibreOffice that is pre-configured for "complex text layout" -- i.e. editing Hebrew and other right-to-left languages. (This would, at the very least, challenge popular Hebrew desketop word processors (like DavkeWriter) to stop using pre-Unicode Hebrew fonts.

2) I'd like an open-source cross-platform installer for folk to install the fonts from our font-pack. Users would have a choice of the fonts they'd want installed by license, foundry, level of Hebrew diacritic support, or type. This would help the harried Jewish educator get what they need installed quickly without expecting them to jump through the hoops that they currently have to, to install the fonts.

If you have the desire and capability, please volunteer for either of these projects (noting that we are always looking for developers for help finishing work on our Open Siddur web application <http://app.opensiddur.org>).

Thanks and shabbat shalom!

Aharon

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Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org