Aleph Lamed Combination

[Aaron Breceda]

i'm currently working on a translation of a text that is from an Arabacized country and therefore commonly uses a character which is an aleph combined with a lamed. i've been going through and correcting the text to separate the two, but then this is a definite change to the original text. Therefore i thought it might be a good idea to see if this symbol can be added to Sepharia so it can be used to keep the originals original.

At the top of this post is a picture of the character/ligature and more information about it can be found at: http://typophile.com/node/83222

[Brett Lockspeiser]

Hi Aaron,

The Aleph Lamed ligature is a valid unicode character:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fb4f/browsertest.htm

This means that it should work just fine to save and present in Sefaria. The Hebrew font we're currently using is Times New Roman -- on my quick test this character looks like the below in Times New Roman: 

In the future we may change our fonts of offer more options which could have it look otherwise, but there shouldn't any trouble saving the character in Sefaria now. 

Thanks,

Brett

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[Efraim Feinstein]

Hi,

The character is a ligature -- a feature of the design/typography -- and is semantically equivalent to aleph followed by lamed. Is there any reason at all to retain it in a text? 

(1) Similarly, should the fi ligature (fi) be used when the original text typography uses it for English?

(2) If the text were to be pointed in the future, how would the aleph-lamed ligature be pointed correctly to retain the correct order of combining marks?  

I'm not sure what normalization form <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/> Sefaria uses internally. Converting the text to Unicode normalization form NFKD would automatically convert ligatures/composed forms to the non-ligature character and also avoid composed forms with vowels. 

-Efraim