Language Support A Simple Technique for Typesetting Hebrew with Vowel Points

This paper describes a simple mechanism for typesetting Hebrew with vowel points. Hebrew uses a large set of accents that represent vowels, consonant modifiers, and cantillation instructions. These accents are placed above, below, or inside letters; a single letter can carry several accents. The solution that we describe, which is designed for PostScript [2] output devices, leaves the placement of the accents to the output device. TEX regards the accents as zero-width characters and does not process them in any special way. Samples of the output are shown in Figures 1 and 2. The paper only addresses the issue of typesetting vowel and consonant modifiers, known collectively in Hebrew as nekudot, or points. We refer to this group of accents as vowels in the rest of the paper. Cantillation marks are only used in printing Biblical texts; they are missing in most fonts, and they complicate the placement of accents. In particular, a cantillation mark attached to one letter may require ajdustments in the positioning of adjacent letters and/or marks attached to them. Vowels, on the other hand, are widely used in Hebrew printing, and are included in most of the Hebrew fonts that have been produced in recent years. A vowel mark attached to a letter does not affect the positioning of other letters or the marks attached to other letters. Without vowels, it is only possible to determine the meaning and pronunciation of many words from their context. Although all proficient Hebrew readers can read most texts without vowels, vowels are still used in printing of liturgical texts, poetry, and texts for beginning readers. Vowels are