Five fonts from the Open Siddur Open Source and Unicode Hebrew Font pack: Miriam CLM, Hadasim CLM, Linux Libertine, Mekorot-Rashi, and Shlomo Semi Stam (credit: Aharon Varady, license CC-BY-SA)
“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]
To aid in the dissemination of free/libre Hebrew fonts, the Open Siddur Project now offers, gratis, a FONT PACK. Over sixty free/libre and open source licensed, Unicode Hebrew fonts, ready to install. Enjoy them. Share them. Learn from them. Modify them.
11 fonts supporting the full set of diacritical marks (vowels/nikkud and cantillation/t'amim).- Shlomo, Shlomo Stam, and Shlomo Semi-Stam (by Shlomo Orbach)
- Ezra SIL/SR (SIL v.2.51)
- Cardo (by David Perry, v.104s)
- Keter YG, Keter Aram Tsova, Taamey David, Taamey Frank Taamey Ashkenaz, and Shofar (by Yoram Gnat, Culmus Project)
14 fonts supporting niqud (w/out t'amim)
- Mekorot Vilna (by Mekorot)
- Mekorot Rashi (Mekorot, fixed and adjusted by Yoram Gnat, Culmus Project)
- 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)
- Shuneet by Cunliffe Thompson)
- Alef (by HaGilda)
- Linux Libertine (by the Libertine Open Fonts Projekt)
45 fonts (not intended for use with niqud)
- 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)
- Comix No2 CLM by Richard Schoeller for the Culmus Project)
- Anka CLM, Gan CLM, Gladia CLM, Hillel CLM, Ktav-Yad CLM, Ozrad CLM (Fancy Fonts by Maxim Iorsh, Culmus Project)
- Refoyl and Nachlaot (cursive fonts by Refoyl Finkl)
- Migdal HaEmeq, Miri, Retro Perspective, Stop Motion, and Tnua Libre (by Elad Mordechai Mizrahi)
- Asakim, Dragon, Nehama, and Paskol (by Printer Killer)
- FreeMono, FreeSans, and FreeSerif (by the GNU FreeFont Project)
4 fonts of symbols and dingbats
- Caladings CLM (v.0.12 by Maxim Iorsh, Culmus Project)
- Musica, Symbola, and Unidings (by George Douros)
10 Non-Hebrew Open Source Unicode Fonts
- Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Ge’ez, and Arabic (by SIL)
- Linux Biolinum (by Linux Libertine)
- Aegyptus, Akkadian, Analecta, and Anatolian (by George Douros)
DOWNLOAD: ZIP (v.1.14, 47.5 MB/49,877,686 bytes) | PDF (Open Source and Unicode Hebrew Font comparison chart)
INSTALL
If you’d like to install all the fonts in the font pack at once, follow these instructions:
- To search and find all of the TTF files in the unzipped directory of fonts, use CTRL-F
type *.ttf (asterisk dot ttf) as your search keyword. Repeat this step but type *.otf for searching for and installing OTF files. - The search will list all of the fonts in their separate directories.
To select all of them at once use CTRL-A. (Alternately you can click edit on the windows toolbar and select, “select all”.) - Then right-click on any of the highlighted fonts and select “install font”. (Make sure to right-click rather than left-click, otherwise you won’t see the install font option and you’ll have to select them all again using CTRL-A.)
(Setup your own keyboard to type in Hebrew, here.)
Why did we make this font pack?
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 are all shared freely with a GPL including the 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?
“פונטים קוד פתוח ביוניקוד | Free/Libre and Open Source Licensed Unicode Hebrew Fonts” is shared by The Hierophant with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
how about SBL Hebrew? It’s a beautiful font and free.
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!
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!
Thanks so much for posting these! A real boon to my pathetic attempts at signage in Hebrew.
Please, does anybody know what font i can use with nikud:
where the SAMEJ and the MEM SOFIT, are just like the same, well almost the same, but both seams a “square”.
English is not my mother tongue, so i hope you can undertand what i am trying to ask.
Thank you!!!
I am looking for free font similar to
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/masterfont/torah-mf/
can anybody please advise?
thanks
In the Open Siddur font pack, look for Shlomo Stam and Shlomo SemiStam if you would like niqqud support. There is also Sofer Stam Ashkenaz and Sofer Stam Sefarad from the Culmus Project without niqqud support.
After unzipping, searching and selecting, there is no option to install the fonts. Can someone please tell me how to install the fonts? I have Office 2003 and windows xp. Thanks in advance!
See above, in the section labeled “Install”. Thanks for pointing this out though. We should include a text file with these simple install instructions in the next release.
Hi, thanks and my apologies for being illiterate when it comes to digital matters but to my best understanding I have followed all the instructions in the ínstall’ section on the online instruction manual (unzipped, searched for the tff files, selected them). The problem is that upon selecting, there is no ínstall’ option – not by right-cick, left-click or scrolling down the menu on top of the search results. Am I overlooking some instruction?
What about an UGLY font, specifically intended for proofreading, one that exaggerates the differences between ו/ן/ז, ב/כ, ם/ס, נ/ג and overblows nikkud? Like DPCustomMono2 which unfortunately targets only the latin-1 subset (see e.g. http://www.pgdp.net/c/faq/font_sample.php). Has anyone attempted it for hebrew?
I don’t know of any such Hebrew font. Maxim Iorsh and Yoram Gnat (developers) at the Culmus Project might know. It certainly sounds useful.
I really appreciate the STaM font set you provided as well as some other specific Hebrew fonts – Rashi and ancient scripts. Thank you all very much for openly sharing this great resource. May the continued blessings of Ha’Shem be upon you…..
Thank you. The best way to reciprocate is to help with our project. If you can’t volunteer your help, please make a donation.
A few fonts with basic Unicode Hebrew support. [SIL OFL licensed]
Thanks for the fonts. I’ve created a website for free Hebrew web fonts:
http://freefonts.co.il
This looks great, Ido, although I think you are also obligated to include attribution and license information for each font. It’s important to credit the typographers and type foundries who made these fonts in the first place since they’ve been so gracious as to share their work with open source licenses. Could you help us create such a site so that we could show all of the fine work of Hebrew typographers creating Unicode fonts? I need to have them represented in sortable categories: by typographer/foundy, by license (SIL OFL, GPL, GPL+FE), by support for diacritics (ti’amim/cantillation and niqqud/vowels), and by script type (serif, sans-serif, cursive, calligraphic, and ancient).
THANK YOU! This is an incredible long awaited resource
I am using these fonts on a middle east version of the adobe programs on a mac. I double clicked on the fonts to install them. When I try to use them, the typefaces show in english characters… any ideas what I am doing wrong?
Make certain that you have installed (and activated) a Hebrew keyboard layout when typing in any application after selecting your preferred Hebrew font. There is a Hebrew Keyboard Layout for Mac OS X included with the font pack. Look in the directory labeled “Keyboard layouts.”
You’re welcome, Dena. If you appreciate our work, please consider making a donation.
Thank you for your help!
I installed the keyboard layout and activated it. I now can type in adobe programs with the fonts, but I am still unable to change text that is currently in other fonts, to your fonts… any suggestions?
Not knowing anything about the fonts you are trying to replace text with, I can’t comment with any authority. If the text of the fonts you are attempting to replace are encoded in the Unicode standard, then there should be no problem. Perhaps you are attempting to replace the text previously displayed with a non-Unicode font. As I wrote above, non-Unicode fonts are terrible to work with. Unfortunately, they are the default fonts that some products like DavkaWriter ship with their software. My recommendation is to avoid such fonts and any software that requires you to depend on them to display the text you want.
Thank you.
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