Past

The Online Hebrew Tutorial versions 1.0 - 2.0 started off as a Microsoft Word for Mac document, formatted in these fonts -

• Rosetta Hebrew

• Rosetta Hebrew Script

• Times New Roman

• Geneva

• Super Hebrew

It was later converted to PDF and HTML (as GIF and JPEG images).

This Word format was not the best choice, discovered when people asked to translate it to other languages. For example, Super Hebrew was a bitmap, Mac only font in a non standard character arrangement encoding.

The PDF format had advantages -

• printed nicely.

and disadvantages -

• Super Hebrew and Rosetta Hebrew Script where not properly anti aliased and appeared jagged on screen. This was an artifact of the tool used to produce the PDF, not a problem with the fonts.

• Acrobat viewer was required, and not as ubiquitously installed back then as it is now.

The HTML format had advantages -

• No special installations of fonts required to view it.

and disadvantages -

• could not resize the fonts.

• was no good for printing.

• it took a lot of work to cut out the images and put them into web pages.

Present

The original version 2.0 Word document has almost all Hebrew changed to Unicode Text Format, as part of getting the first translation out in Spanish.

Unicode problems are:

• Editing with Unicode can be diabolical. The input method tries to do smart things with quotes etc.

• It seems impossible to colour a Hebrew consonant and its associated vowel independently. Please get in contact if you know otherwise.

Other translations won't require this to be redone. If you want to translate the document use the Online Hebrew Tutorial In Spanish. The original English Word document is here OnlineHebrewTutorial.doc

This format can be shared across platforms. Foundation Hebrew and Foundation Hebrew Script are now used solely where a cursive font is required - a small number of places.

Due to bugs in Hebrew Unicode support in Microsoft Word at the time, we used the open source Open Office in combination with Word. So you now have more choices - Word version 11 up on Mac or Word version 9 up on PC; or Open Office on PC, Mac or Unix. Whatever you use, with a little fiddling, is now interoperable.

Editing in either presented challenges. Here are some Open Office Editing Tips.

Turns out that Unicode can't allow independent highlighting of the consonant and its associated vowel as could be done with Foundation Hebrew, so that facility is dropped from the completed documents.

Going forward only a PDF version of the document will be distributed as final output, and a Word document serves as the working copy.

Future

It is expected to use Latex / Lyx on future versions, but that is considerably more difficult to edit in (normally used to typeset mathematics).