Re: Hebrew and Greek fonts

Jonathan Robie (jwrobie@mindspring.com)
Sat, 14 Dec 1996 16:52:01 -0500

The Summer Institute of Linguistics is planning to release freely available,
professional quality Hebrew and Greek fonts. These are not yet released, and
they prefer not to be contacted about them at this point, but they have
given me permission to make some information about the fonts public. Here is
an excerpt from an email that was sent to me which describes these fonts.

Jonathan

P.S., since it is possible to specify fonts for messages viewed in the
B-Greek archive, we could use these to allow Greek letters in B-Greek
messages. They will be available for both Mac and Windows.

>Hi Jonathan,
>
>We hadn't done so yet, since we hadn't actually released anything. But you're
>right. When I'm a little more sure of a release date I'll write something
>formally. What we plan to release is actually a complete system of a range of
>fonts (real greek and translit, and a special apparatus font with lots of
>characters that you would find in a critical text) in bold, italic, etc. the
>usual expected of good quality fonts. A keyboarding solution using an SIL
>utility called Keyman that will handle *almost* all conceivable ways of keying
>greek characters and a Mac equivalent utility called SIL Key. We are also
>providing GX fonts on the Mac with WorldScript stuff. Then to polish it off
>we've drafted an encoding standard that is 7-bit based for transport between
>platforms, with utilities that will convert text in that format to a
"composite"
>encoding that our fonts will use and back again. (The Mac GX fonts though are
>based on the standard encoding, since they have the smarts to deal with that.)
>
>As you can see we've tried to develop a comprehensive solution. We're pretty
>close to release for the Greek fonts, though we still need some touchup on the
>conversion utilities, and we need to implement the Mac version of the
keyboard.
>The Hebrew version of this project is well under weigh as well, but has a
number
>of other difficulties that will take some time to deal with.
>
>If you'd like to post/quote even what I've just written on the list, feel free
>to do so - we just don't want people beating down our doors with continual
>requests. One of the advantages we have is that we have a professional quality
>font house 'inhouse' in the form of our International Publications Dept. who
>have been doing specialized font solutions for years for our translation
>projects.
>

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Jonathan Robie
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