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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 fonts for Windows: Ezra SIL SR, Ezra SIL, 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, most of our visitors so far are 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.

For Windows 98, we can only recommend the earlier ver. 1.10 of the Code2000 font by James Kass. There is a later version at his site, but we cannot yet recommend it for Hebrew under Win98; it probably looks much better on XP, however.

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 spacing difficulties; 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.

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

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

Code2000, which also has straight marks:

3 Megabytes and supports 33993 glyphs; $5 shareware.

Cardo71, which has straight marks:

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

Cardo65, which has traditional rounded marks:

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

Microsoft's Arial Unicode:

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

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. But one who has the patience to do so can download and install a much better version for free from Microsoft itself (we are not authorized to distribute it, but it is presumably permitted to tell you where it is on the Microsoft site, to save you the trouble of hunting for it yourself. If you want to try it, here is the multi-step process:

Download the 3.73 MB msvolt.exe, saving it to disk, not opening it
Right click on the msvolt.exe and open it with Winzip (or other zip-extractor)
Right click on the VOLT.CAB in the list inside Winzip and open it with Winzip
Click on VOLTSupplementalFiles.exe and extract it
Right click on the extracted VOLTSupplementalFiles.exe file and open it with Winzip
Right click on the usp10.cab in the list inside Winzip and open it with Winzip
Extract the readme.txt file and the usp10.dll
Read the readme.txt file, for it has useful information in it; but we advise against changing your system copy of usp10.dll (some Microsoft documentation recommends against this, too)
Make a backup copy of your current usp10.dll file (or each of them, if you have several) before replacement!
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 "Ezra SIL 1.1\Documentation\Changing your Uniscribe version (usp10.dll).pdf" in the Ezra SIL package
You can now erase the downloaded msvolt.exe and the rest of the files not used

You are likely to be astonished both by the improvement in the appearance of Hebrew with cantillation marks and by the relative slowness of your system's rendering of it (at our site, this slowness only affects the cantillation pages); we think the results are well worth the wait.

This tiresome process for updating the usp10.dll will eventually become obsolete, when Microsoft starts distributing the better usp10.dll as a part of their generally excellent Windows Update service. Windows Update for Win98 as of early April 2003 does have an updated usp10.dll, but it seems to be like the one in XP, which still is not nearly as good as the one we are recommending here.

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last updated: 19 June 2003