Be very careful in choosing hebrew and greek fonts...

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stu2
Posts: 2
Joined: 2005-09-12 20:34:20

Be very careful in choosing hebrew and greek fonts...

Post by stu2 »

I'm about to purchase Nisus Express 2.5, having been very impressed with the demo. They're apparently working on the OpenType font issues which currently prevent full compatibility with many OpenType fonts' support for some of the more complicated characters.

And I _almost_ purchased greek and hebrew fonts from Linguist's Software (http://www.linguistsoftware.com/), which sells unicode fonts in both languages.

But it turns out that the $99 USD per font doesn't allow you to print to PDF. To print a PDF, you need to pay an additional "modest fee" (description from the very well hidden caveat on their site) of $200 per font to enable them to be used in PDFs. I've verified this with their president, and while it's fine to charge whatever you want for products, I do think such a limitation needs to be made clear to buyers.

Yikes!

There are lots of alternatives now with a similar feature set. Here's what I'm looking at now:

Society of Biblical Literature has a free unicode Hebrew font with a full set of OpenType glyphs. Works with Mac, Windows, Unix.
http://www.sbl-site.org/Resources/Resou ... Fonts.aspx

The Cardo font is another with the same feature set, and is a very large font that includes both greek and hebrew.
http://www.scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html

GreekKeys now has unicode support, and is nicely packaged up with keyboard maps, etc. No PDF restrictions that I can see, and at $40 is a very reasonable price for a popular font.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/gre ... kKeys.html

I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I've found so far. Does anyone know of others, or have any input on their experiences with these?

Hope this can save others the disapointment of finding fonts they paid for are crippled.
DavidK
Posts: 72
Joined: 2004-10-26 15:35:19
Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Hebrew Fonts

Post by DavidK »

I have found the following, and they seem to work (most of them, at least), but I am far from an expert on font issues, so check them out for yourself:

http://www.mendelsson.co.il/yakov/myfonts.htm

http://www.oketz.com/fonts/good.html

Some of the true type fonts I found seem to be made for Windows -- but they install properly in OSX and show up on the screen properly.

David
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