bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #25887, FreeSans Hebrew most nonspacing...

 
 

bug #25887: FreeSans Hebrew most nonspacing marks are spacing

Submitter:  None
Submitted:  Mon 16 Mar 2009 06:57:04 PM UTC
Votes: 10
 
Category:  character range Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  letter positioning poor Status:  Fixed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  Stevan_White
Originator Email:  -email is unavailable- Open/Closed:  Closed
Release:  * 2008-03-23
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Thu 01 Dec 2011 04:30:14 PM UTC, comment #8: 

I think all is well now.

Raphael A. Finkel <refoyl>
Thu 01 Dec 2011 01:12:30 PM UTC, comment #7: 

Hi Raphael and Mark,

Did you guys look at the 2010 release of FreeFont in this regard?

I'm planning to make another release soon; if all these issues are fixed, I'd like to close the report!

Let me know if you'd like to see a recent snapshot.

Cheers!

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Mon 11 May 2009 09:26:31 PM UTC, comment #6: 

Raphael, sorry for the long delay in responding.

*) The vowel_below_heb mark should most likely be centered under the vertical stroke for resh (05e8) and dalet (05d3).

OK, I have done this

*) You might actually want three different vowel-above marks: for those that are placed on the left, such as kholam (05b9) and sindot (05c2) [which is missing any mark], those that are placed in the middle, such as rofe (05bf) [missing a mark], and those placed on the right, such as shindot (05c1).

OK, this sounds like the right approach.  I'll split this into a separate bug report.

*) The font is missing the Hebrew cantillation accents in 0591-05ae.

I know. I really don't understand how they are meant to work, anyway.  Let's get vowel pointing right first, then cantillation...  But I'll split it into a separate report.

*) There will be problems that I don't know how to fix when a cantillation accent overlaps a vowel; both get moved about to resolve the overlap.

I haven't attempted to implement these, due to this very complication and my poor understanding of it.

*) I don't see any kerning for Hebrew letters or vowels, but if the anchors work, kerning shouldn't be necessary.

No kerning is implemented.  But kerning is a very fine typographic adjustment that has nothing to do with such things as mark placement...

*) Does Pango understand the anchors? In my experience, it doesn't.

It certainly does, under normal circumstances.  If it doesn't work for you, please describe your circumstances, and what you see, exactly.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Mon 06 Apr 2009 01:10:26 PM UTC, comment #5: 

In revision 1.266 of FreeSans.sfd, I see a few things that you might want to fix.

The vowel_below_heb mark should most likely be centered under the vertical stroke for resh (05e8) and dalet (05d3).  See the Makor reference in an earlier posting for reasons.

The vowel_above_heb mark should be on the left, not the right, of Hebrew consonants if you want to place a kholam (05b9) properly.

You might actually want three different vowel-above marks: for those that are placed on the left, such as kholam (05b9) and sindot (05c2) [which is missing any mark], those that are placed in the middle, such as rofe (05bf) [missing a mark], and those placed on the right, such as shindot (05c1).

The font is missing the Hebrew cantillation accents in 0591-05ae.

There will be problems that I don't know how to fix when a cantillation accent overlaps a vowel; both get moved about to resolve the overlap.

I don't see any kerning for Hebrew letters or vowels, but if the anchors work, kerning shouldn't be necessary.

Does Pango understand the anchors?  In my experience, it doesn't.

Raphael A. Finkel <refoyl>
Mon 06 Apr 2009 08:07:04 AM UTC, comment #4: 

Raphael,

Regarding support of font features.

First, gedit itself does not render text.  It uses an underlying font rendering library "Pango", shared by many GTK applications.

Getting most particular features to work is terribly tricky.  I don't pretend to understand it well, but you should find many features working in GNU FreeFont. 

I'll just put in my observations about the features you mentioned.  I'm using Kubuntu 8.10...

anchors (mark-to-base, mark-to-mark)
    These definately do work.  Thai in FreeSerif uses them.
    Getting combinations of them to work is very tricky, and I have never come to a complete understanding of the issues.
    Anchors (for vowel marks) have been added to the Hebrew range in FreeSerif, in CVS.

non-standard ligatures
    I haven't seen any application (Linux or Windows) that uses the HLIG or DLIG features.  By nature, one would expect that the user would somehow need to turn them on (or that they would be selected by script)

kerning
    This is working, as of the latest release of FreeFont, in Windows, Mac and Linux.  Getting it working was tricky.

feature selection by language
     I had hoped to handle the khirik-yud distiction with this way.  Unfortunately, I haven't seen an application where it works right.  In HTML, one can explicitly set the language of ranges of text, and expect font features to be selected accordingly.  Doesn't work.  Maybe a feature request should be considered for Pango.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Mon 23 Mar 2009 11:57:56 AM UTC, comment #3: 

Let me answer a few questions that Steve White raised off-line:

To see how to place marks in Hebrew, let me recommend the documentation of the Makor package for Omega (TeX). See, for instance,

    http://mirrors.med.harvard.edu/ctan/language/hebrew/makor/tex/makor2/

It seems to me that Hebrew/Yiddish needs to place three marks on every base character: vowel below, dot inside, vowel above. 

Each vowel needs one of these marks as well.

There are subtleties.  (1) There are two different forms of a kholam on a vav (for Hebrew), the usual one with the kholam above the vav, pronounced /o/, and one with the kholam above but a bit to the left, pronounced /vo/.  I have seen a proposal for separate Unicode points for these, but I don't think it has been accepted.  (2) Yiddish and Hebrew differ on placement of a khirik under a yud; Yiddish raises the khirik above the baseline, but Hebrew leaves it below the baseline.  Yiddish does the same for a patakh under a tsvey-yudn; Hebrew doesn't use this glyph at all, so it is safe to raise the patakh here in any font.  If the font can distinguish the language context, then the mark for vowel-below on the yud and tsvey-yudn for Yiddish should be above the baseline.

I use gedit 2.24.2 on Ubuntu/amd64. I have not tested the FreeSans font, but my experiments in building my own font (for Lampungese) indicate that gedit ignores anchors, non-standard ligatures, and kerning when specified in the font. 

For Hebrew/Yiddish, I don't think ligatures are the way to go, except for precomposed forms in the Unicode block fb1d-fb4f.

Raphael A. Finkel <refoyl>
Thu 19 Mar 2009 11:18:47 PM UTC, comment #2: 

Mark,

Thanks for your input!

What is your current assessment though?  Is FreeSans usable for display of Hebrew?  Are there any specific problems?

A lot of changes have been made in the Hebrew ranges over the past year.  Check out the Changelog file.


Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Tue 17 Mar 2009 06:40:51 PM UTC, comment #1: 

I can report that this is no longer a problem following my updating my FreeFont to latest versions. I'll enclose a new PDF and screen image showing how it looks in Firefox now to compare with the earlier ones.  Here's the new version information via Font Information in FontForge:

FreeSans Revision: 1.256
Creation Date: 17 Feb 2008 04:38:55 PM EST
Modification Date: 17 Mar 2009 02:25:14 PM EDT

(Hmmm.... The creation date is the same as before, and the mod date is today (when installed).  Oh well, I guess that info is not too useful?)

(file #17719,

Mark H. David <mhd>
Mon 16 Mar 2009 06:57:04 PM UTC, original submission:  

Hebrew diacritics (a/k/a nikud, niqud, vowels, points, vowel points, etc.) are placed horizontally after, i.e., to the left, of their base character in most cases.  This is true of, e.g., segol, patah, qamats, dagesh, et al.  It is not true of shin-dot and sin-dot, which only apply to the shin base character.  All diacritics I've seen seem to be placed correctly in the vertical dimension, e.g., dagesh is placed about in the vertical midpoint of the base character, and segol, et al, are appropriately below the base character.

You can see a range of fonts and Hebrew script examples in the attached HTML document, and I'll enclose a PDF of how it looks in Firefox (version string: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030423 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.7)

It appears (per Font Information in FontForge) that I have:

FreeSans Revision 1.136 on my system.
Creation Date: 17 Feb 2008 04:38:55 PM EST
Modification Date: 22 Mar 2008 10:11:39 AM EDT

Anonymous

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attach Files:
   
   
Comment:
   

Attached Files
file #17719:  muchnikud-download.html-2.pdf added by mhd (98KiB - application/pdf - PDF of all fonts and Screenshot of FreeSans after upgrade to FreeSans Revision: 1.256 -- reported problems no longer manifested.)
file #17720:  muchnikud-download.html-2.png added by mhd (12KiB - image/png - PDF of all fonts and Screenshot of FreeSans after upgrade to FreeSans Revision: 1.256 -- reported problems no longer manifested.)
file #17708:  muchnikud-download.html added by None (24KiB - text/html - HTML document that tries to display a wide range of Hebrew character combinations for a wide range of downloadable fonts, including FreeSans; a PDF of how it looks in Firefox/Ubunto; a PNG screen capture of the characters rendered using FreeSans.)
file #17709:  muchnikud-download.html-freesans.png added by None (17KiB - image/png - HTML document that tries to display a wide range of Hebrew character combinations for a wide range of downloadable fonts, including FreeSans; a PDF of how it looks in Firefox/Ubunto; a PNG screen capture of the characters rendered using FreeSans.)
file #17710:  muchnikud-download.html.pdf added by None (102KiB - application/pdf - HTML document that tries to display a wide range of Hebrew character combinations for a wide range of downloadable fonts, including FreeSans; a PDF of how it looks in Firefox/Ubunto; a PNG screen capture of the characters rendered using FreeSans.)

 

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Carbon-Copy List
  • -email is unavailable- added by refoyl (Posted a comment)
  • -email is unavailable- added by Stevan_White (Posted a comment)
  • -email is unavailable- added by mhd (Updated the item)
  • -email is unavailable- added by mhd (Voted in favor of this item)
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    Follow 12 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2011-12-01 Stevan_White StatusProceeding Fixed
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2009-05-11 Stevan_White StatusNeed info Proceeding
    2009-03-19 Stevan_White Categoryoverall font problem character range
        StatusNone Need info
        Assigned toNone Stevan_White
    2009-03-17 mhd Attached File- Added muchnikud-download.html-2.pdf, #17719
        Attached File- Added muchnikud-download.html-2.png, #17720
    2009-03-17 mhd Carbon-Copy- Added mhd
    2009-03-16 None Attached File- Added muchnikud-download.html, #17708
        Attached File- Added muchnikud-download.html-freesans.png, #17709
        Attached File- Added muchnikud-download.html.pdf, #17710

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