Using Arabic and Hebrew PostScript fonts with Ps-anc

[ about ps-anc | about LifeLines ]

A short history

In 2003...

• James van Zandt offered a new feature for ps-anc that allows the font for a person's name to be different from the font used for the individual information (dates, addresses).
• Robert Simms (me) had been pondering on how to show names in Arabic or Hebrew (with right-to-left placement of characters) but keep the individual info. lines in a roman font. Once the name font could be shown in a different font, it became more useful to be able to display a second name as information. A person's first name could be shown in Arabic/Hebrew and a second name, along with the information, could be shown in English.
• A PostScript Hebrew font, jerusalem, was found right away (lacking in some characters in modern use). But a good Arabic font would have to have both stand-alone letters, and letter forms made for connecting to other letters, as in cursive handwriting. Finally, thanks to a LaTeX-based typesetting system called Omega, a font was found with all the standard Arabic letter forms and vowel marks. The font is called OmegaSerifArabicOne. See http://www.arabion.net/learnarabic.html for a basic Arabic writing tutorial. According to Guide to teTeX Documentation, Omega "extends TeX for mixed multi-lingual typesetting using unicode." More details may be found in Draft documentation for the Omega system and Multilingual Typesetting with Omega, a Case Study: Arabic. It may be the case that Omega is now bundled with teTeX.
• Then support had to be added in the PostScript output for automatic right-to-left placement of characters based upon the fontname. (This seemed necessary in a bidirectional document.)
• A few characters were missing from OmegaSerifArabicOne (since it is apparently just part of a set that makes up a virtual font). They were needed by ps-anc so, using pfaedit for Xwindows, the hyphen and space characters were established at their usual positions. The space is for separating name parts, and the hyphen is used to establish the relative placement of horizontal lines and name text (by the PostScript code in the output files of ps-anc).
• Fortunately, Omega is made available under GNU GPL, so that is how the modified OmegaSerifArabicOne font shall be made available.
• It would be a potentially wasted effort to tie the character codes in a database to the non-standard character codes in a PostScript font (especially since there was no on-screen equivalent to the font). So it seems best to enter information in a database using UTF-8 so that Roman and Arabic or Hebrew characters can be used side-by-side. Also, UTF-8 has support for the different Arabic letter forms, vowel marks, and many ligatures. The work of converting those character codes into those used by the Arabic PostScript font is left to a translation table to be used with report generation.
• UTF-8 capable terminals (on at least Mac OS X) make the display of the Arabic/Roman blend of text possible. Here's a screen-shot of the OS X Terminal's "Window Settings..." display dialog, and a screen-shot of the encoding choices. See mixed-language screen shots below under Examples.

  Now in Mac OS X 10.3, the character palette will show related characters. For example, if the Arabic letter 'beh' is selected, then the generic beh, isolated beh, final beh, initial beh, and medial beh are all shown as choices for selection or insertion into the current document.

Examples

• Hebrew
  • An example of Hebrew used for names in a ps-anc chart, with a line spacing issue to work out -- appears to be due to the Jerusalem font having a bad 'FontBBox'. The FontBBox is supposed to be a rectangle in which any character would fit, but with this font, it looks like the bottom of that rectangle is at the baseline, and the top is about 2/3 the way up most letters. So a slight modification of the Jerusalem font seems called for, or maybe a new version of the font is waiting to be found?
  • Hebrew example screen shot with LifeLines running through Mac OS X Terminal (with UTF-8 encoding, font Geezah 14pt.)
• Arabic
  • An example of Arabic used for names in a ps-anc chart
  • Arabic example screen shot with LifeLines running through Mac OS X Terminal (with UTF-8 encoding, font Geezah 14pt.)

Downloads

• Hebrew
  • Jerusalem font for Hebrew characters, includes the PostScript font, installation tips, and .tt files.
    
  • chart of Jerusalem font characters, informational only, not required to use the PostScript font
  • As of 7 Nov 2003, .tt files for converting between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-8 encodings are now bundled with other .tt files with the LifeLines source code.
    
  • NEW: OmegaSerifHebrew chart under consideration as a more complete PostScript Hebrew font. It looks like the character in the 2D (hex) position is supposed to be used for a hyphen character. Ps-anc uses the hyphen/minus to decide how to shift names relative to horizontal lines connecting them to the rest of a chart. So I'm wondering if it would be better to use the 'maqaf' or add a minus character as the model for horizontal-line/name alignment.
  
  
• Arabic
  • OmArabicRsimms fonts for Arabic characters, includes PostScript fonts, installation tips, and .tt files.
    
  • chart of OmArabicRsimms font characters, informational only, not required to use the PostScript fonts
  
  

Additional information

• Arabic
  • Learn Arabic, an easy overview of the basics of Arabic writing
  • Authentic Arabic: A Case Study, Technical and Aesthetic Challenges -- a glimpse of the challenges to typesetting Arabic script
• Hebrew
  • Hebrew Alphabet, a simple overview of the Hebrew alphabet
• Unicode, in General
  • Unicode Home Page
  • Unicode charts
  • UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
  • Everson Mono -- an alternative font that includes Hebrew and Arabic characters for Unicode. Currently only for Mac OS X, but with indication that a Windows version may come soon. The Arabic glyphs aren't monospaced, not a problem for Terminal in Mac OS X, but this may be an issue for other platforms when this font is available for elsewhere. The Roman characters show up better in the Terminal app. though, since they are monospaced (unlike Baghdad and Geezah fonts in Mac OS X).