I'm glad to hear it. But such things need to be cross-platform. They should also be public*, because that is the only way to make them cross-platform and because that way we can all be sure that all expert opinions have been taken into account. So probably Unicode is the appropriate forum for discussions and for formalising these things. On this issue there seems to be a serious lack of input from Jewish and Israeli scholars. I just received a critique of Ezra SIL from an Israeli source which would probably not have been necessary if he and others like him had been consulted earlier.
One of the specific issues he brought up was this one: how do you distinguish the holam-waw vowel combination from the consonant waw followed by the vowel holam? They are clearly visually distinct in BHS and other printed Hebrew Bibles, see Genesis 4:13, contrast words 4 and 5 in BHS. And they are clearly semantically distinct. On a related issue, how do you encode holam above the right side of aleph, as in the very common Hebrew word for "head", see Genesis 3:15 12th word? This is another issue on which different texts differ, and in nearly every verse as holam-waw is very common. (Consonant waw with holam is not very common, but it is not rare either.)
These are display issues, not encoding issues, so I don't think Unicode is necessarily the correct body to determine how they should be handled. Much depends on the font format used, and how this interracts with the OS and application script engines. I'm pretty sure that most of what I've done in the OpenType lookups in SBL Hebrew could be done in a very similar fashion in an AAT for the Mac, or in a Graphite font, but this doesn't mean that another -- perhaps cruder, perhaps more sophisticated -- rendering system wouldn't require a completely different approach to achieve the same visual result.
The way to encode all of the things you mention is pretty straight-forward, but in the case of the vav+holam vs holam+vav, in addition to two different precomposed glyphs, my font also contains a series of six lookups, including one that specifically handles Ha Shem, to make sure these render correctly in all circumstances. The positioning of the holam over the right side of alef and shin is handled contextually.
There is a document currently available at ftp://publisher.libronix.com/drop/Tiro/SBLHebrew-Distribution/SBLHebrew-MarkSequences.pdf that displays every sequence of consonant + mark(s) that occurs in the BHS text and the Westminster morphological database, with post-context consonants. This doesn't give a perfect representation of what happens in every circumstance (pre-context consonants affecting horizontal position of telisha gedola are missing; when holam is shifted left over shin, the document does not display additional contextual interraction with the shin dot), but it's a pretty thorough rendering test. This document and the manual will shortly have a permanent home at http://www.sbl-site.org/fonts/hebrew/
I'm anticipating that, as the SBL font goes into use, some updates will be necessary, but I'm pretty confident that most problems have been caught and corrected in pre-release testing. I spent a lot of time checking rendering of specific sequences against the printed BHS and BHL.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The sight of James Cox from the BBC's World at One,
interviewing Robin Oakley, CNN's man in Europe,
surrounded by a scrum of furiously scribbling print
journalists will stand for some time as the apogee of
media cannibalism.
- Emma Brockes, at the EU summit
