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# Fonts for Bible with Cantillation Marks

The normal Hebrew fonts supplied by Microsoft with the Internet Explorer browser do not support cantillation marks or even some of the standard non-cantillation marks of Hebrew. If you see black blocks between the letters instead of cantillation marks, you need to install a special Unicode font that does support Hebrew fully.

Many Unicode Hebrew fonts seem to be in development and some are already available. At this point, we know of three reasonable free or inexpensive fonts for Windows: the Ezra SIL SR and Ezra SIL version 2 and Code2000. There are also the Cardo fonts, two more fonts that are said to work nicely on other systems, which did not make a good show on Win98SE; there is also a Cardo font for Mac (which we could not test, as we do not have a Mac).

See below sample displays from our Win98SE system running IE6. In all fairness to the font makers, these are fonts mostly designed for Win2000 and XP, and our graphics from use of them on Win98SE are not truly representative of the best they can do; but for better or for worse, many of our visitors seem to be still running Win98. To get the best results from Win98 (and even XP, for that matter), one needs to install a very recent version of a special system file known as USP10.DLL.

We ask for your recommendations, if you think that another font is better and still reasonably priced or free. For optimum results, one needs the latest Microsoft operating systems and their improved support for the new OpenType fonts; OpenType fonts work rather imperfectly on Win98, unless you update the USP10.DLL.

For a page that shows in highly concentrated form many problems in displaying Biblical Hebrew, see Unicode Marks; that site also has a complete Unicode Bible text with vowels, and it promises to eventually provide a Bible with cantillation marks according to the Leningrad Codex and an interlinear Bible text. The Unicode spacing difficulties page also has a link to Microsoft's "Arial Unicode MS" which is the largest font we have seen; despite its size, it is ugly in Hebrew and barely readable.

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Ezra SIL SR, which has traditional rounded marks:

Very light weight 128K, but only supports 392 Latin and Hebrew glyphs; freeware.

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Ezra SIL, which has straight marks as in most old manuscripts:

Very light weight 129K, but only supports 392 Latin and Hebrew glyphs; freeware.

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Code2000, which also has straight marks:

3 Megabytes and supports 33993 glyphs; $5 shareware.

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Cardo71, which has straight marks:

Only 387K, but supports only 1391 glyphs for Latin scripts, IPA, Hebrew, and Greek; freeware.

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Cardo65, which has traditional rounded marks:

Only 332K, but supports only 1299 glyphs for Latin scripts, IPA, Hebrew, and Greek; freeware.

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Microsoft's Arial Unicode:

24 Megabytes and rather ugly, but a real polyglot supporting all of the 51180 Unicode 2 glyphs!

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Upgrading the USP10.DLL

The normal versions of the Uniscribe Script Processor (usp10.dll) available on all systems we have seen, including XP with Office XP installed, do a poor job of rendering some passages of Hebrew with cantillation marks, especially in the Psalms; only systems with Office 2003 can come close to properly displaying full Biblical Hebrew. But one can download and install the Office 2003 DLL from here. (If this link does not work for you, please let us know, so we can fix it.)

You need not replace your system version of usp10.dll, and some systems such as XP will insist on your not doing that. Just put a copy in the folder where you have the Internet Explorer installed (generally a folder called C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer); if you like it and want to use it for Word as well, put a copy in your Word folder, too (in the case of Office XP, in the folder named \program files\common files\microsoft shared\office10). For more information on locating the old copies of the usp10.dll once you have the new one in hand, see the "Changing your Uniscribe version (usp10.dll).pdf" in the Ezra SIL package

You are likely to be astonished by the improvement in the appearance of Hebrew with cantillation marks with this DLL, just as we were.

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last updated: 27 September 2004