What a pun, eh? This blog is about fonts. To begin, you can ask me what was the hardest thing about redoing all the books, not that you think the effort was worthwhile, but you can still ask.

Go on, ask.

I didn’t hear you.

Say it: What was the hardest thing about redoing all the books, Joe?

Ah, well, since you ask, it was the fonts. In my old-style books, the Hebrew font originated with Digifonts, and that I converted and adjusted with FontLab’s TypeTool (to make scalable .ttf files). Typing was left-to-right, so all the Hebrew was typed bacjwards, though this isn’t really difficult or much less “natural” than typing in any other direction. The Hebrew font was a nice font, a bit blockish, but nice. However, I didn’t have all the characters, such as the cantillation notes. I couldn’t easily do bold or italics.

So for some years I viewed with yearning the standard Hebrew fonts in Windows.

The problem was, I’d have to retype every Hebrew word, each consonant and each vowel, sometimes two or three vowels for a consonant.

I knew I could do it with a macro, but it took me a couple of years to get my macro working. That’s what took so long. Eventually, I had a macro that could convert the direction of each word in a line and each character in each word, so that I could use any of the fonts Microsoft offered.

This solved a very pesky problem. When typing Hebrew back-to-front, spilling past the end of a line pushes the beginning of a phrase onto the next line. Ooh, embarrassing! Using standard Hebrew fonts typed front-to-back (for Hebrew) eliminates the risk of this happening.

The English translation and transliteration used to use a sans-serif font, just because it was narrower than others; someone pointed out that it’s easier to read unfamiliar words such as transliterated words when the font has serifs, so I made that switch too. That didn’t involve any retyping.

I also made sure that the transliteration column is always the same width. The Hebrew and translation columns can grow and shrink as necessary to get the best phrasing on a line, but the transliteration is always the same width. This was surprisingly difficult to achieve, but eventually I found the macro commands to make this happen pretty reliably.

So I owe a lot of thanks to Microsoft and to Word, even though Word can be mighty frustrating. Once you know something that really works in Word, you can do it again and again, for hundreds of pages.

I’m glad you asked. If you didn’t enjoy the answer, you could have stopped reading, so don’t blame me for boring you.