“Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems.”[1] The importance of sharing documents with Unicode 4.0+ compliant Hebrew fonts was underlined for us in early 2010, after the liturgy of a popular siddur was contributed to the Open Siddur Project with a public domain declaration. The format of the file shared was a PDF, and unfortunately, most of the text rendered in the PDF was encoded with old proprietary Hebrew fonts made by a commercial font foundry, Elsner+Flake. These fonts were developed prior to the standardization of Hebrew in Unicode. Efraim and I made some progress in attempting to convert the documents but so far we have not been successful. (Perhaps you can help convert them.) The contributor had no other copies of the liturgy except for what was contained in the PDF shared. The entire sad episode indicated the need for publishers of digital documents to prepare their documents in open standard formats, with text encoded with open standard fonts. (You are free to try your hand at converting the two documents (1, 2) which were shared by the Avi Chai Foundation. )
Given the twenty year history (at least) of digital Hebrew font development, there are quite a few pre-Unicode Hebrew fonts floating around the Internet and locally, on folk’s home computers. On the Internet, they sometimes show up on font download websites with a note that they are shareware or freeware with some restriction or another. Documents prepared with non-Unicode fonts are destined to be unreadable.
Even if a Hebrew font is Unicode it might 1) not support the full range of diacritical marks (nikkud/vowels and ta’amim/trope/cantillation) and 2) not be licensed in such a way that it does not conflict with free/libre and open source licenses. Currently, there are three popular sources of open source licensed and Unicode compliant Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritical marks (vowels and cantillation).
Moreover, by license these fonts are free for creative reuse (as well as free without license fee to download). SIL International’s Ezra SIL font and David Perry’s Cardo font are both shared using SIL’s Open Font License version 1.1.0
Yoram Gnat’s fonts at the Culmus Project: Keter YG, Keter Aram Tsova, Taamey David, Taamey Frank, and his Ancient Scripts fonts — are all shared freely with a GPL 2 with GPL’s font exception clause. Maxim Iorsh’s fonts (for instance, Drugulin CLM) are shared with a GPL 2 but without the font exception, and so the use of Iorsh’s fonts can sometimes conflict with the licenses of other free/libre and open source projects. (A full list of acceptable open source licenses for digital fonts is available here.)
It is often a wonder how certain typefaces, designed over a hundred years ago and residing in the Public Domain, can nevertheless be restricted by software licenses. After all, even new typefaces in the United States and Canada cannot be copyrighted; only the underlying software logic in digital fonts that control the placement of letters and diacritics can be copyrighted. While the art may be in the Public Domain, the underlying logic may be considered software and thus be protected by copyright. The good news is that many digital fonts use the underlying font logic written by John Hudson which itself is freely licensed open source software (with the MIT license).
If you or your company designed a Hebrew font which you never updated to Unicode, why not share it with an open font license so that others may adopt it, update it, and create anew with it.
To aid in the dissemination of free/libre Hebrew fonts, the Open Siddur Project now offers, gratis, a FONT PACK. Fifty-eight free/libre and open source licensed, Unicode Hebrew fonts, ready to install. Enjoy them. Share them. Learn from them. Modify them.
6 fonts supporting the full set of diacritical marks (vowels/nikkud and cantillation/ta'amim).- Ezra SIL/SR (SIL v.2.51)
- Cardo (by David Perry, v.104s)
- Keter YG, Keter Aram Tsova, Taamey David, Taamey Frank (by Yoram Gnat, Culmus Project)
11 fonts supporting niqud (w/out ta'amim)
- Mekorot Vilna (Makor)
- David CLM, Dorian CLM, FrankRuehl CLM, Hadasim CLM, Miriam CLM, Nachlieli CLM, Simple CLM (v.0.12 by Maxim Iorsh, Culmus Project)
- Shmulik CLM(by Yoram Gnat, Culmus Project)
- MikeHebrew (v3.3 by Cunliffe Thompson)
- XITS (designed by Khaled Hosny)
42 fonts (not intended for use with niqud)
- Garton Rashi (a corrected version of Makor Rashi)
- Sofer Stam Ashkenaz, Sofer Stam Sefarad, and 16 really Ancient Semitic Scripts (by Yoram Gnat, Culmus Project)
- Drugulin CLM, Aharoni CLM, Miriam Mono CLM, Yehuda CLM, Ellinia CLM, Journal CLM (v.0.12 by Maxim Iorsh, Culmus Project)
- Anka CLM, Comix No2 CLM, Gan CLM, Gladia CLM, Hillel CLM, Ktav-Yad CLM, Ozrad CLM (Fancy Fonts by the Culmus Project)
- Refoyl and Nachlaot (cursive fonts by Refoyl Finkl)
- Migdal HaEmeq, Miri, Retro Perspective, and Tnua Libre (by Elad Mordechai Mizrahi)
- Asakim, Dragon, Nehama, and Paskol (by Printer Killer)
- FreeMono, FreeSans, and FreeSerif (by the GNU FreeFont Project)
1 font of dingbats
- Caladings CLM (v.0.12 by Maxim Iorsh, Culmus Project)
7 Non-Hebrew Open Source Unicode Fonts
- Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Ge’ez, and Arabic (by SIL)
DOWNLOAD: ZIP (v.1.7, 25mb) | PDF (Open Source and Unicode Hebrew Font comparison chart)
(Setup your own keyboard to type in Hebrew, here.)
An earlier version of this post was crossposted to the Typophile forums. This post has been modified since it was first posted.
how about SBL Hebrew? It’s a beautiful font and free:
http://www.sbl-site.org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx
It certainly is a beautiful font. However, SBL’s user license has certain restrictions on it especially in regards to using the font in printed works. The SBL license is restricted to “non-commercial” use and requires commercial users to pay a license-fee.
As one of the main objectives of our project is providing resources for folk designing and crafting siddurim for print, we must be careful to integrate technologies that are being shared with compatible free and open source licenses. Also, for the sake of disambiguation, the Open Siddur Project defines “free” in accord with this Definition of Free Cultural Works. Or to say it as others do — free as in “Freedom” rather than free as in “free beer.” Because the Open Siddur Project is a free and open source project we cannot and would not distribute resources which restrict downstream users from crafting a work that they might sell, i.e., commercially — for example, a siddur.
Oh, awesome! The world has been waiting so long for this. Well done Open Siddur Project!
[...] Siddur Project, I’ve been putting together a font package for more easily distributing extant free/libre licensed Unicode Hebrew fonts. These fonts tend to be licensed with SIL’s Open Font License (e.g., EzraSIL and Cardo), or [...]
[...] FONTS: Ze’ev helped convince the Culmus Ancient Hebrew Script Project to make their free (GPL) fonts even free-er with the GPL font exception. Google helped convince the maintainer of the Cardo font to share the font with SIL’s Open Font License. [...]
[...] and invited to help the Open Siddur Project craft a new edition of this siddur using standard Unicode Hebrew fonts. Rabbi Wiesenthal’s layout guide is as follows: Regarding the order of the tefillot, I [...]
I have found that there are issues with the niqudot when using these fonts on a Mac inside of the microsoft office suite. Taking the same exact file and opening it on windows displays proper placement of the niqudot. Is there work going on to investigate the reason for this difference?
David, try LibreOffice for Macs. I can’t speak for the behavior or bug reportage of Microsoft’s proprietary software on it’s competitor’s platform. My recommendation is to stick close to free/libre software whenever possible.
Is there a font that support the Babylonian and/or Palestinian (eretzisraeli) niqud too?
I’ve been searching for that for ages!
Unfortunately, the Unicode standard does not support all of the characters needed for Babylonian niqqud. There have been some proposals put forward to the Unicode committee and John Hudson (who developed the SBL Hebrew font) is interested in getting a formal encoding proposal put forward (see here: http://typophile.com/node/68761 ); however, nothing has been done yet. Therefore, any font that supports Babylonian/Palestinian niqqud would map the “user” codes that would not match what eventually does become the standard (if there ever is one) in Unicode. At least one person has already created such a font (see here: http://typophile.com/node/83292 ). The download link for the font is at the bottom of that page.
I just found another font that supports the Babylonian/Palestinian niqqud. It’s a commercial product: LaserHebrew (see here: http://www.linguistsoftware.com/lheb.htm and scroll down to the description/samples of the “Hebraica II Supra” font).
Alas, not only is Hebraica II Supra proprietary, it’s also not yet unicode.
@Tal, definitely write to the Maxim Iorsh and Yoram Gnat at the Culmus Project. They might be interested in providing those diacritics for one of their fonts.
Amazing source of free fonts. Bravo and thank you.
this is great thank you! trying to find fonts in a language you don’t yet speak well is not easy, thank you for this resource!
[...] Download our Open Source Unicode Hebrew Font Pack and install the fonts on your operating system. There are six fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics (niqqud/vowels and ta’amim/cantillation): Ezra SIL/SR, Cardo, Taamey Frank CLM, Keter YG, Keter Aram Tsova, Taamey David CLM, and Taamey Frank CLM. [...]