Category Archives: Technical

Trick to use Hebrew and Yiddish in Adobe InDesign

Software, Technical, , ,

This is the second article in a series on publishing text in Hebrew and Yiddish for genealogy books. The first article looked at Finding Hebrew Fonts. This article looks at using those fonts to publish Hebrew, Yiddish or any Right-to-Left (RTL) language using Adobe InDesign, without having to buy the more expensive Adobe InDesign ME (which has extensive support for RTL languages).

The standard software for professional publishing these days is Adobe InDesign. When publishing genealogy books there are genealogy programs that can output formatted reports and books (such as the  book output options of Heredis and GEDitCOM II mentioned on Tuesday), but if you want a fully customized book that can be published professionally (or through an online publisher/printer like lulu.com) either you or someone else who is helping you will likely need to use InDesign. InDesign itself is not cheap (about $650), but if you want to use RTL languages like Hebrew, Yiddish, or Arabic, it costs hundreds of dollars more for the ME (Middle East) version.

Why would you want to use RTL languages in a genealogy book? Some examples include transcribing Jewish gravestones which in many cases are at least partially (and frequently wholly) in Hebrew, and transcribing handwritten Yiddish letters. You could just put in a translation of the texts, but adding the original text, especially when the orginal may be hard to read, is a nice touch.

Since most people are not going to buy InDesign just to put together one book, they probably will be using a copy at work, or have a friend who has a copy help them out. If that’s the case, however, chances are the copy of InDesign they are using will not be the ME version with support for RTL.

There are actually three InDesign add-ons you can buy that will enable RTL features in standard InDesign, idRTL from Zartech for $50 (CS4 and later), World Tools from In-Tools for $99 (CS4 and later), and ScribeDOOR from WinSoft International for $151 (for CS5, CS5.5 and CS6). The cheapest solution is still $49. Again, maybe too expensive, especially if it’s not for a copy of InDesign you own. So what if you could use RTL langauges in InDesign without an expensive plug-in? Well it turns out you can, with a little trick I’m going to show you.

Keep in mind this trick won’t add all the RTL features that the ME version of InDesign offers, but it will let you insert RTL text that will lay out properly. For short texts like gravestone transcriptions, or simple texts like letters, this is more than enough. If you want to format complicated things like forms and complex layouts, chances are you’ll need to spend the extra money and get one of the other solutions.

Technically this has been possible since InDesign CS4, but I believe it may have required some scripting to make it work. I’m using CS6 and there is nothing you need to get it working other than following the steps below.

Open InDesign, and go to the Paragraph settings. You want to select the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer:

Step 1: Select the Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer

This is what defines the type of text-box you create when using the Type Tool in InDesign.

Next, select the Type Tool:

Step 2: Select the Type Tool, and create a text box

and with the Type Tool selected, create a text box on the page.

Now, make sure the cursor is flashing in the text box and then, while holding down the Command key on a Mac, or the Control key on Windows, right-click into the text box (right-click on a Mac is either holding down the Control key while clicking, or on a newer trackpad using two fingers to click). That will bring up a menu:

Step 3: Command/Control Click and select ‘Fill with Placeholder Text’ from menu

When you see the menu, select ‘Fill with Placeholder Text’. If you were not holding down the extra key (Command on the Mac, or Control on Windows) then it will just insert placeholder text in English characters. If you were holding down the extra key, you will instead see a window pop up:

Step 4: Select Hebrew from the pop-up menu

In this small window, you need to select Hebrew (or Arabic) in order to get RTL text inserted. When you click OK, you’ll see the placeholder text inserted:

Hebrew Placeholder Text in the text box

Besides having random Hebrew text, you’ll also notice the text box is now in RTL mode and you can edit Hebrew text properly.

Now you just delete the Hebrew text and your cursor will be on the right side of the text box, ready to enter any RTL text, whether Hebrew, Yiddish or Arabic.

Empty Text Box in RTL mode ready for text entry

You can change your font, size, whatever – and it will now all work in this text box. Use any number of Hebrew fonts, like those I mentioned in my recent article Finding Hebrew Fonts.

If you use this tip, let me know. If you’re interested in hearing more about publishing genealogy books, let me know in the comments.

Genealogy Apps in the Mac App Store (Update)

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Over two years ago I wrote about the launch of the Mac App Store, Apple’s resident app store available on all modern Macs, and the three genealogy-related applications that launched with it. At the time the three applications available were MacFamilyTree, Family Tree Maker, and Date Calculator.

Two years later, what is the state of Mac genealogy in the App Store? There are now six applications that show up if you search ‘genealogy’:

Six Genealogy Apps in the Mac App Store

MacFamilyTree and Date Calculator are still there, while Family Tree Maker has been dropped from App Store. Newly added applications include Heredis, My Family Tree, GedScape Gold, and MemoryMiner.

Why did Ancestry.com drop Family Tree Maker from the App Store? I have no idea, but there are a few possibilities. The coding standards for applications in the Mac App Store are very strict, and they’ve gotten stricter over time. It’s possible one of the those restrictions made it difficult for Ancestry.com to comply with the rules of the store. It’s also possible that the lack of a clear upgrade path in the App Store was a bigger issue. Ancestry.com sells annual upgrades to their genealogy applications, and the App Store doesn’t make this very easy. If anyone purchased Family Tree Maker on the App Store, I’m curious if you received any notification that the app was pulled, and for what reason.

Heredis had a major update recently, and that included launching it into the Mac App Store, as well as a free version for iPhone and iPad. Heredis calls this version the ‘Blue Suite’ and includes interperable version on PC, Mac, and iOS. I haven’t used this new version of Heredis, but it looks quite impressive. There’s actually a 20% off sale going on now for Heredis, through February 24, through the app store or through their web site. They have a free trial version also, so it’s worth checking out first. Two of the more interesting features to me include the ability to create illustrated charts (i.e. a tree superimposed on an actual tree graphic) and the ability to generate a book. I’ve published a genealogy book before, but it required a lot of work in Adobe InDesign, and took months to finish. Imagine being able to generate a book with a single click? I haven’t used this feature, but it’s something I think all genealogy application should offer in some form.

My Family Tree and GedScape Gold are two apps I’ve never heard of before. My Family Tree seems to be a chart-based genealogy app that keeps an updated chart that you can add people to, but they show no other features in their description, and no trial version on their web site. According to reviews in the App Store, there are some bugs and support is not easy to get. It looks like an early version of an app that could offer a simple genealogy option to some, but it isn’t quite ready yet (or supported well enough). GedScape Gold is a program to browse GEDCOM file and output a web version of your family tree. The application seems to have mixed reviews, although unlike My Family Tree, there is a support site and a free trial version available to test before buying. I suppose there is a purpose for GEDCOM viewers, but I certainly lean towards more full-featured applications.

MemoryMiner is an application I really like, and am happy to see it’s in the App Store. This application fits in my visual sensibilities, where you can take a large number of photographs and link each person in the photo and can switch between looking at photos fro ma specific place, or of a specific person, etc. It’s very powerful, and also includes the ability to import a GEDCOM file to populate the person database. My only big problem with the app is that while you can import a GEDCOM, it’s very difficult to subsequently update information on the people you import. If you’re working on a project over a long period of time, chances are your family database will be updated, and it would be great if you could import those changes easily. Another problem is the web site of the company hasn’t been updated since 2011. Hopefully this is still an actively developed application, as it is unique in the way it allows you to tell a visual story of your family.

One last note. In my post last year, I mentioned that Date Calculator was created by the same company that puts out GEDitCOM II, a very interesting genealogy program for the Mac. GEDitCOM II has some very advanced features I’ve never seen in any genealogy program on any platform, including scripting using Applescript, Python and Ruby (including an online library of downloadable scripts), allows you to completely customize the user interface (including downloadable UIs), outputting a book using LaTeX (see this PDF of a book output of the Windsor family), etc. It’s really quite an impressive program, but even though its been updated to work with application signing for OS X (a feature needed to show that a program is from a reliable source), it is not yet available through the App Store. I’m sure there are some good technical reasons for it not being available through the App Store, but it’s really a shame as I think GEDitCOM II is underrated and could use the extra publicity of being available through the App Store to gain marketshare.

Finding Hebrew Fonts

Software, Technical, , ,

Even though I live in Israel, my computer operating system runs using English, and almost all the work I do is in English. That said, I occasionally have the need to do some work in Hebrew, which presents some problems. One problem is that I don’t have a lot of Hebrew fonts on my computer, and usually whatever project I’m working on requires something slightly different (requiring me to find an appropriate font).

For genealogists, one use for Hebrew, even for those who do not speak Hebrew, is to transcribe the exact text on Jewish gravestones, which are frequently partially (and sometimes completely) in Hebrew. When publishing books on your family history, having the right fonts to publish those transcriptions can be very important. Another use is transcribing family letters written in Yiddish (Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). By the way, if you do want to transcribe Yiddish, an interesting tool online is called the Yiddish Typewriter and it lets you enter Yiddish in various forms, and it then outputs it into many more forms (including YIVO transcription, IPA transcription, PDF, Image (GIF, etc.) – it looks quite useful.

In this post I’m going to share some places you can find Hebrew fonts. Most of the sites I’m going to point out have free fonts, although I’ll also include a few commercial sites. Keep in mind I’m not going to explain how to use these fonts on your computer, that’s a whole different topic.

So first, I should point out that there are different ways to divide Hebrew fonts, and I’ll take a look at a few.

First, Hebrew fonts can be divided into three categories:

1) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks – also called Trop in Yiddish)
2) Fonts that support Nikudot (vowels) but do not support Taamim
3) Fonts that support neither Nikudot nor Taamim

A few things about these categories:

Category 1 is essentially only needed when one is reproducing a biblical passage, and not always. Taamim (cantillation marks) are used to show the reader of a passage how to pronounce that passage when reading it aloud in synagogue. There are other interpretations of the Taamim, but they are beyond the scope of this post.

Category 2 includes Hebrew vowels, which unlike in English, are not letters, but diacritical marks. In modern Israeli Hebrew, these vowels are usually not used. You won’t, for example, see them in most books or newspapers. Newspapers published for people new to Hebrew (such as immigrants to Israel) use vowels, as it makes it easier to read the Hebrew (one doesn’t need to figure out the word based on context). This is a niche market. Vowels are also frequently used in the publication of Hebrew prayer books. That said, if you plan on printing something in Hebrew that is going to be read by someone not fully fluent in Hebrew, including vowels is a good idea.

Category 3 is the largest category of fonts. Most modern Hebrew fonts will fall into this category, not only because Israelis don’t use vowels, but because implementing vowels as diacritical marks is a pain in the neck for font designers.

Here’s an example of Hebrew text with both Nikudot and Taamim:

Nikudot (Vowels) in Blue, Taamim (Cantillation Marks) in Red

This is a passage from Exodus Chapter 7 – roughly translated as “and the river will swarm with frogs, which will go up and come into your houses”. The font is called Taamey Frank CLM, part of the free Culmus font collection I mention below. The text with Nikudot and Taamim came from the Mechon Mamre web site.

As you can imagine, designing fonts that take into consideration the proper placement of all of those marks is complicated. Considering that Hebrew has the history it does, there are still many uses for fonts with Nikudot (vowels) and Taamim (cantillation marks). Recently, a new English edition of the Talmud has been started called the Koren Talmud Bavli, which is the first Talmud that I’m aware of that includes the full text of the Talmud with Nikudot in the standard Vilna page layout.

Like in English, there are also serif and san-serif fonts – and like English, sans-serif fonts are generally perceived as more modern. There are also monospaced fonts.

There are also handwriting fonts, and fonts in alternate Hebrew alphabet forms like Rashi Script (which was not used by Rashi, nor is it really script).

You might find handwriting fonts that include Nikudot, but I doubt you’d ever see one with Taamim since it’s a printing mark, and not generally handwritten.

Warning on using old Hebrew fonts

One more point worth making is that fonts in Hebrew were previously available in many formats that didn’t work well together. Windows had one kind, Macintosh had another, and each went through different versions that didn’t work even on the same platform. There are different ways of displaying Hebrew on the Internet as well, called visual and logical Hebrew. Visual Hebrew is the older format, still used on many Israeli sites. Logical Hebrew is the now standard format, which should be used by everyone. Old fonts were also encoded in different character encodings (like ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-8-i, or Windows-1255) instead of the more modern Unicode encoding formats (like UTF-8). I bring all of this up to point out that if you are scouring the net looking for Hebrew fonts, be careful not to install old fonts which might not use the latest standards. Look for fonts that mention Unicode, UTF-8 or UTF-16. If you have old Hebrew fonts on your computer – consider replacing them if they use one of these older formats – because even if they work on your computer you probably won’t be able to share whatever you create with anyone else.

Okay, that all said, where do you get Hebrew fonts?

If you have no Hebrew fonts and want to get a variety of fonts quickly, there are two sites which have collected free Hebrew fonts and bundled them together for download.

The first is the Open Siddur Project, which has a Font Pack which includes 8 fonts with Nikudot and Taamim, 14 fonts with Nikudot, and 46 other Hebrew fonts (without Nikudot or Taamim). Note that all of these fonts are free and in Unicode format so you know they will work on modern computers and are interchangeable with other people. There is a PDF available that shows samples of all the fonts in the font pack. A few examples from the PDF:

A selection of fonts from the Open Siddur Project’s Font Pack

The second is from The Bold Edge | Jewish Design Central, which has a Free Hebrew Font Collection. I’m not sure how many fonts are in this collect or what kinds there are, but it includes 50 different font files (although some may be in the same font family). I’ve requested they put together a PDF showing which fonts are included, so hopefully they will add that eventually.

Next, there is the Culmus Project whose goal it is to provide free Hebrew fonts for use with Linux and Unix systems. Even so, these fonts should work on Windows and Mac as well. There are 14 font families includes currently (full list – lists Latin counterpart fonts when they exist). In addition to some standard fonts that are serif, sans-serif and monospaced, they also have display fonts (Fancy) and fonts that include all the Nikudot and Taamim (Taamey). The Taamey fonts are downloadable individually, but for the rest, you need to download a file from their download page (at the top you should see a link right next to the text “Looking for the latest version?” and that’s the file you need.

One interesting font is called Alef. It’s a new font designed from the ground up to be used for both Hebrew and English, and on the web. I don’t see any reason it can’t be used in print as well. It’s a free font licensed under the SIL Open Font License (see below). It was designed by a group of Israeli designers including Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michal Sahar and HaTayas (Danny Meirav) who together make up the HaGilda font foundry, and Nir Yenni. One of it’s intentions is to replace Arial as the default choice for Hebrew web sites.

Scholarly Fonts

Another source of fonts worth nothing are those developed by different organizations for use by biblical scholars.The first is Ezra SIL which was developed by SIL International, a non-profit organization that carries out linguistics training and research globally, and is based on the font used in the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia)  The font is Unicode and contains Nikudot and Taamim. There are actually two versions of the font, Ezra SIL and Ezra SIL SR, the difference being in the style of Taamim. The regular Ezra SIL follows the format of the BHS, while Ezra SIL SR follows a more traditional (in Jewish usage) rounded style of Taamim.

Ezra SIL fonts also support OpenType, and take advantage of some OpenType features like ligatures (aleph-lamed ligature) and positioning to position the Nikudot and Taamim better. To use OpenType features, you need a program that supports them (such as Word 2010 and later on Windows, Mellel on Mac, or Adobe InDesign). There is something else special about the Ezra SIL fonts – they are open source. They use a license called the SIL Open Font License. You can freely modify them and re-distribute your changes (however, you can’t use the world Ezra or SIL in the new font). This has led to other Hebrew fonts based on Ezra SIL.

An example of new fonts that derive from Ezra SIL are the Shlomo Fonts. These fonts are modified from Ezra SIL SR, and change some of the letters to make them easier to read. Some letters in Hebrew are very similar (ד/ר and נ/ג for example). Shlomo Fonts try to modify these similar letters so they are more easily distinguishable at first glance. An example of the difference:

Note the difference between the second letter from right (ג) in each font

Another font designed for academics is Cardo, designed by David J. Perry. It also uses the SIL Open Font License, although it is not, as far as I can tell, derived from Ezra SIL (although possibly the Hebrew part is). The font also includes Greek and Latin characters. This font is still being refined, and new versions do occasionally come out (the last released version was in 2011). Cardo is also an OpenType font. Cardo actually comes with a 57-page PDF user manual, which is useful to read if you want to get the most out of the font. The manual is included in the font file download.

Another academic Hebrew font is SBL Hebrew. SBL Hebrew is also Unicode and supports OpenType features. It also has a PDF user manual, which is 23 pages long. It seems that to some extant SBL Hebrew is positioned as a newer more advanced version of Ezra SIL. Indeed, it seems Ezra SIL and SBL Hebrew share at least one creator in common, John Hudson. Unlike Ezra SIL and Cardo, SBL Hebrew is not licensed under an Open Font License, but is freely usable for non-commercial purposes. For commercial use, it can be licensed from Tiro Typeworks.

Commercial Fonts

Some commercial font foundries that sell Hebrew fonts include Ascender and Adobe (Adobe’s Myriad Hebrew is particularly interesting because it is a large set of Hebrew fonts that match up with the much-used Myriad Pro font in English). There are several Israeli foundries like Masterfont (see them also on MyFonts.com or fonts.com in English interfaces), and FontBit (I can’t find them on an English site). There is also a site called Webmaster.org.il (in Hebrew) that collects fonts from many smaller type designers around Israel and links to them.

There are several Jewish software companies (I mean Jewish in that their software is Jewish-oriented) that offer Hebrew fonts. Davka offers a set of 116 Unicode Hebrew fonts called Hebrew Font Portfolio. Unfortunately, none of them support Nikudot. Davka also offers a set of 30 fonts that do include Nikudot and Taamim called Hebrew Font Gallery Deluxe. I’m not clear if these are Unicode or not. Kabbalah Software offers K-Fonts Collections with various types of Hebrew fonts like Body Text,  Calligraphy, Design, Headline, Invitation, etc. They are all Unicode, however for some reason they are listed as working on Windows only. Definitely do not buy their ‘Classic Mac’ fonts which are not unicode and will not work properly on modern systems. The site looks a little out-of-date, so I’m not sure if this is an active company.

Hebrew-ish

One last thing, there is a class of fonts which are not Hebrew at all, but for lack of a better term I’ll call Hebrew-ish. They are English fonts that use Hebrew letters that are repositioned, flipped, warped, whatever to make them into English letters. In other words, you can type in English and get English words that look vaguely Hebrew. This is a gimmick popular for graphics for Jewish events, etc. I’m not recommending this, I just thought it was interesting that there is a whole class of fonts like this. There are many fonts like this (probably more than a dozen easy to find). Below you can see four of them – Jerusalem, Peace, Shalom, and Ben Zion:

“Hebrew-ish” Fonts

I hope this post was useful. If you have other good Hebrew font resources, please share them in the comments. I hope to follow this up soon with an explanation of how to get Hebrew working on your computer, including a neat trick for using Hebrew with Adobe InDesign without having to shell out the extra money for the Middle East edition.

Mac indexing software for World Archives Project

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I wrote previously about the World Memory Project (WMP), a collaboration between the USHMM and Ancestry.com to index USHMM-held records using Ancestry.com’s indexing software from their more general World Archives Project (WAP). In fact, if you look at the World Archives Project site, you’ll see all the World Memory Project projects now are listed as part of their large World Archives Project list.

One of my earliest blog posts (just over two years ago) was on the topic of Giving Back Through Indexing, and suggesting volunteering for online indexing efforts as a way of giving back to the genealogy community. At the time FamilySearch’s was the largest effort (and probably still is) and Ancestry.com had yet to launch WAP.

The World Archive Project also lists as partners many genealogy societies, including (among Jewish groups) JewishGen, JGS of Los Angeles, and JGS of Southern Nevada.

Ancestry.com makes all databases indexed through the WAP available for free through their site, although access to images is not free, and sometimes not available at all on Ancestry.com. In some cases, like with USHMM records, the images may only be viewed at the host organization itself.

One of the criticisms I had of the Ancestry.com’s WMP and WAP projects when I wrote my earlier article was that they didn’t have Mac indexing software. As a Mac user I was especially disappointed in not being able to participate in these projects.

Apparently, back in October Ancestry.com launched the Mac version of their indexing software (they call it the Keying Tool). I hadn’t noticed that until now, so I downloaded the software and gave it a spin. Like the similar software for FamilySearch indexing, the user interface is a bit clunky. My biggest problem

RootsMagic joins FHISO effort to improve genealogy standards

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I’ve written before about efforts to improve genealogy standards (The Future of Sharing and Genealogy Standards, Another Look). It was in 1995 that the last real standard of GEDCOM (GEnealogical Data COMmunication), version 5.5, was released. Most genealogy programs support a draft release which was released in 1999, even though it was never finalized, called GEDCOM 5.5.1. So it’s been at least 13 years since any standard has been created that has been used for genealogy.

Earlier this year, the GEDCOM X effort was announced, but it is not yet used in any products. The other major effort, started earlier, but without the support of FamilySearch which originally created GEDCOM, is the Family History Information Standards Organization (FHSIO). Originally called BetterGEDCOM, it is an effort started by genealogists to create a new open standard for exchanging genealogy information.

In May, FHISO announced that Ancestry.com had joined as a founding member of the organization. Personally, I was hesitant to attribute as much as you might think to that announcement, as nothing in the announcement mentioned support in FamilyTreeMaker (their desktop genealogy application) nor Ancestry.com itself.

Yesterday, however, it was announced that RootsMagic had also joined FHISO as a founding member. As a major provider of genealogy software, it’s great news that they’ve joined this effort to create new standards. Without support of genealogy software companies, none of these efforts will be worth much.

Hopefully we’ll see other genealogy software companies like Millenia (Legacy Family Tree), Leister Productions (Reunion for Mac) and Incline (Ancestral Quest) will also support this effort, as well as open source efforts like GRAMPS.

UPDATE: On August 15, it was announced that WikiTree has also joined FHISO as a Founding Member. Good to see. I’m a fan of WikiTree, and its support of FHISO can only be a good thing.