Unicode Cuneiform Fonts!

Ok, over the years on this blog I've highlighted the evolution of proprietary to TrueType to Unicode fonts related to biblical studies. For the sake of completeness, here you go for those who need Unicode Cuneiform fonts!
HERE is the link to the info and download page.

HT: Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid on Twitter who also notes:

If your computer or keyboard make downloading a font impossible, and your cuneiform is too rusty for Cuneify, you can copy and paste signs from free online sources. For example, HERE is a basic and searchable list of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform signs.

Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts

In case you are needing a Unicode font for Aegean, Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, Cretan-Hieroglyphs, Aegyptus, EEMusic, Akkadian, Assyrian, Maya, and more, HERE is the place to go. "Free use of UFAS is strictly limited to personal use."

Hoplite Polytonic Greek Keyboard for iOS and Android

The Hoplite Polytonic Greek Keyboard facilitates typing polytonic Greek diacritics. On iOS and Android, the Hoplite Keyboard can be installed as an alternate keyboard system-wide and used in any application. On Mac, Windows, and Linux the Hoplite Keyboard can be used as a LibreOffice extension: type base letters with the Greek keyboard provided by your operating system and toggle on/off diacritics with the Hoplite Keyboard's hot keys.

I have used the Keyman Galaxie Greek/Hebrew (Mnemonic) Keyboard for my Greek and Hebrew typing, but it looks like this Hoplite program is a good option if Keyman is not doing what you need. Like Keyman, Hoplite is also free.

Features:

• One key per diacritic
• Add diacritics after typing the vowel
• Add diacritics in any order
• Toggle diacritics on/off
• Breathings, accents, subscripts, macrons, breves, diaereses: no problem! (If font supports it)
• Choose precomposed, precomposed with private use area, or combining-only Unicode modes.

HT: Anglican Biblical and Theological Languages Forum on FB

Google Noto Fonts: No more tofu

Google is making available a free, family of font faces that are being shared with SIL Open Font License. Google says:

Beautiful and free fonts for all languagesWhen text is rendered by a computer, sometimes characters are displayed as “tofu”. They are little boxes to indicate your device doesn’t have a font to display the text.
Google has been developing a font family called Noto, which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. Noto is Google’s answer to tofu. The name noto is to convey the idea that Google’s goal is to see “no more tofu”. Noto has multiple styles and weights, and is freely available to all. 

More background information is available here which notes that "Noto is an open-source family of fonts that supports the display of some 110,000 characters from 800 languages." It also works on Android- and Chrome-based devices.


As it pertains to biblical studies, unfortunately, this probably is not a fully satisfying answer. The Noto Serif font includes Greek and Coptic but not Hebrew. The Noto Sans likewise includes Greek and Coptic but not Hebrew, but there is a separate Noto Sans Hebrew. There are other separate downloads for:

• Noto Sans Cuneiform
• Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs
• Noto Sans Ethiopic
• Noto Sans Imperial Aramic
• Noto Sans Linear B
• Noto Sans Phoenician
• Noto Sans Samaritan
• Noto Sans Syriac: Eastern, Estrangela, Western
• and more...

 Those extra font families may make Noto an attractive option, but for most of my work, I'm still using the free Cardo font, the SBL BibLit font (which is a combination of the SBL Hebrew and SBL Greek), or even the Times New Roman (TNR) which can handle almost all Greek and Hebrew needs. (TNR does include critical apparatus markers, but it must substitute for the fraktur characters for the Majority Text and Septuagint and papyrus.)

I find the fonts to be attractive enough, though their clarity is more striking than their elegance. (SBL Lit and TNR are more attractive, in my opinion.) Here's a comparative sample I've created. (Click to enlarge.)

 

Download the Noto fonts HERE. Even if you don't use the Noto fonts, I'm guessing that you at leaste learned that the little blank character boxes is called tofu.

Fonts and Keyboards for Biblical Languages... again

Our seminary is getting new systems for the faculty! (Dell Venue Pro 8) That's great, but it also means we are revisiting what we are doing with fonts and keyboards for working with the biblical languages. I wrote about this matter back in September 2012, and since then, some things have changed and some not. So, this post will be an update of that one with additional info.

FONTS

The font situation is clear for us. We moved to Unicode a few years ago, and at that time David Perry's free Cardo font was really the best choice. It's kind of a 'big' font (the characters are wider than usual and have a high x-height), so it works well in projection. Beginning students like it because it is easy to read. Cardo is now in release 1.04. It's also nice because it contains Hebrew, Greek, and every transliteration character and text critical mark. Further, Google obtained the rights to Cardo, so it transfers nicely back/forth from Google Docs. Cardo looks rather chunky in printed form, however, especially when used with a typical serif font like Times New Roman. Here's where we can thank the Society of Biblical Literature and the groups that supported the creation of high-quality Greek and Hebrew Unicode fonts. There is a SBL Hebrew and a SBL Greek, but we are just installing the combined font set known as SBL BibLit. It's a beautiful font that looks great in print.
SUMMARY: We are installing both Cardo and SBL BibLit on all our systems. I'll still use Cardo for projection, but I use SBL BibLit in printed resources.

KEYBOARDS

The situation is better but still not ideal.

• What I have been doing the last few years is have my students use the Tyndale Unicode Font Kit. It's free. There are installers for various flavors of Windows and for Macs. It installs the Cardo font automatically and handles the right-to-left enabling as part of the installation too. That's all wonderful! I could live with the Hebrew keyboard, but I do not like the Greek keyboard it installs because it requires typing accents and breathings before you type the vowel, and accents and breathings require a variety of CTRL-ALT-Shift combinations.
• For myself, therefore, I have used the superior Tavultesoft Keyman progam. I bought licenses of their Desktop 8 Light version, and they work very well for me. I like the Greek layout for accents better, it allows for accents and breathings after you type the vowel, and it has 'smart' final forms for both Greek (ς) and Hebrew (ך  ם  ן  ף ץ). Until just last October 2014, Keyman cost at least $20 for their light version, and students weren’t going to pay for that when Tyndale was free. As of October 2014, however, Tavultesoft released the light version of Keyman Desktop 9 for free. This version even shows an onscreen keyboard if you want it. Once the program is installed, you load a keyboard. The Galaxie BibleScript Mnemonic is the one you want, and it includes both Hebrew and Greek. The free version only allows for two keyboards to loaded (in addition to the native language), so if you want to type Syriac, Coptic, or Hieroglyphic, you either need to buy the Pro version or dis/enable keyboards.
• How big of a difference is there between the Tyndale and Keyman keyboards?
•  I've noted some of the Greek differences above, and you can see them in practice in the examples below.
• The Hebrew keyboards are very different as you can see in my examples below. The main thing is that Tyndale puts the vowels on English vowel letters, and Keyman puts them all on the number row. Keyman also puts all letters w/ dagesh in the uppercase and has ‘smart’ final forms. Tyndale has a keystroke for adding dagesh, and the final forms are all on the uppercase.
• Tyndale has a printable keyboard layout chart, but I like Keyman because it has a popup keyboard available.

• There are other options for typing in biblical languages, and they might do the trick if you don't have large amounts of text to write.
• There are online tools for small bits of writing. Try the Unicode Classical Greek Inputter. Even better, check out the KeymanWeb for Greek or KeymanWeb for Hebrew and Hieroglyphic and hundreds of other languages. They use the Galaxie keyboards described above, and the keyboard is displayed.
• If you don't use the biblical languages often enough to remember where all the accents and special characters are, check out Logos’ Shibboleth program. It’s free, and it has 15 language sets: Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic,Coptic, Ugaritic, Armenian, South Arabian, Transliteration, Hieroglyphs, Akkadian, Hittite, Old Persian. It’s great because it displays all the characters, and it’s Unicode. (But it isn’t optimal Unicode since it still uses some combining characters rather than the preferred precomposed ones.) 

SUMMARY: I will probably have my students use the Tyndale Unicode Font Kit. It's easy to use, and it does Windows and Mac. Keyman is only for Windows (and iPhone, iPad, and Android). For students who are more confident with their computer skills and are using Windows, I'll suggest Keyman as an option.