Looking for help with Hebrew vowels and cantillation marks

Daniel Mitsui
Daniel Mitsui Posts: 4
in Job Postings
Hello. I am an illustrator and calligrapher who has designed several typefaces based on my own artwork. I am working on a typeface (named Lux) based on display capitals in medieval manuscripts and icon inscriptions, with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. (Eventually, I plan to add Coptic and possibly Cyrillic.)

While I like to think that I am skilled at the artistic aspects of type design, I am pretty clueless when it comes to the technical and programming aspects. 

I want this typeface to be as comprehensive as possible, and I have included the diacritical marks and special characters needed to write almost all European languages that use the Latin alphabet, and monotonic and polytonic Greek. I would also like to include Hebrew vowels and cantillation marks in this typeface, and have designed glyphs for them. But I am having trouble getting them to display in the correct alignment. 

Since unlike in Latin and Greek, the Hebrew letter + diacritic combinations do not have their own unicode points, they need to be made with combining diacritics. I don’t really know how to use these, and the program that I have been using (Type 3.2) seems really limited here. The right-to-left direction makes it more confusing, and the fact that I don’t actually read Hebrew doesn’t help either.

It occurred to me that someone more experienced in the technical aspects of type design, especially in Hebrew, could probably fix this problem quickly and easily. And that it would make more sense for me to hire someone to do this than to buy new software and spend a lot of time learning how to do it myself. 

So, if you are interested in this job, please e-mail danielmitsuiartist@gmail.com.

I have attached a sample of the typeface.
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Comments

  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 680
    Hi,
    You can set up the mark positioning in Glyphs by placing anchor points. This page explains it in detail: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/mark-attachment
    (Disclaimer: I’m the developer of Glyphs).
  • bdenckla
    bdenckla Posts: 20
    edited May 20
    Daniel Mitsui said:

    It occurred to me that someone [...] could probably fix this problem quickly and easily.
    Unfortunately, Hebrew with cantillation marks is not easy, even for an expert. There are people (including members of this forum) who know how to do this work, but even if they are interested in doing such work, be aware that this would be a big (i.e. expensive) consulting project.

    All I can offer as a start is that you (or someone you contract) should feel free to use my OpenType mark positioning logic, if that is helpful. I seem to have licensed that AFKDO ("feature language") code using GPLv2. I'm not sure why I did that. I may have thought that I needed to do that because that's what I saw in the license for Taamey Frank CLM. But I did not need to do that since my code is written from scratch.
  • bdenckla
    bdenckla Posts: 20
    On the letterforms themselves, I'm sure @Scott-Martin Kosofsky could give you far more learned feedback than me, but I'll just quickly note that the order you present them is a nonstandard order that made the sample a little hard to parse, particularly as I could not recognize what this letter is supposed to be (a descender-free qof perhaps?):



    Later you have something that seems much more like a standard qof shape:

  • Daniel Mitsui
    Daniel Mitsui Posts: 4
    I thought I had seen a form of qoph like that in a 16th century printed book, but I probably should revise it if it is confusing. The second one is a rare joined qoph. Is this alphabet more easy to understand?
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 312
    edited May 22

    FontCreator for Windows and macOS can handle this too, and it’s really just a matter of adding a few anchors.

    How it works in FontCreator

    1. Add anchors to your font
      Open the Anchor Manager and add anchors e.g. top-hebr, bottom-hebr, center-hebr.

    2. Add base anchors to your base letters
      Right-click at the position in the Glyph panel wherever the nikud or taʿam should sit and select Add Anchor.

    3. Add matching mark anchors to each combining mark
      that marks the glyph as “the thing that moves.”

    4. Auto-build the features
      Open the OpenType Designer, click Generate and update OpenType layout features, and FontCreator writes the mark and mkmk features and lookups for you.

    5. Test in preview
      You’ll see the marks snap into place, even when stacked.

    You can try it in the fully functional 30-day trial of FontCreator Pro. Happy to walk you through it if you hit any snags.

    — Erwin (FontCreator developer, High-Logic)

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,388
    Biblical Hebrew mark and mkmk positioning can involve contextual GPOS lookups that move marks onto alternative anchors depending on a variety of factors: presence of other marks, position in a word, and in some places very specific situations that occur only in the Masoretic text. So while both FontCreator and Glyphs (as well as FontLab, RoboFont, VOLT, and other tools) can be used to do this in various ways, it isn’t as straightforward as typical font mark anchoring.
  • bdenckla
    bdenckla Posts: 20
    Daniel Mitsui said:
    I thought I had seen a form of qoph like that in a 16th century printed book, but I probably should revise it if it is confusing. The second one is a rare joined qoph. Is this alphabet more easy to understand?
    The new qof is immediately recognizable, having a descender that is not only present but also, as you mention, disconnected, as is customary. The more standard alphabetic ordering also helps.

    In the big picture, a font with ornaments like this is rarely used with diacritics, so that part of your project is not only hard but also somewhat aesthetically... adventurous, let's say.

    A compromise might be to support only vowels, not cantillation. That is a much simpler problem, one that can be largely or wholly handled with fixed anchors. As @John Hudson commented, some of the (well-meaning) contributors to this thread may not be aware of the complexity of cantillation mark placement.

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