Wikipedia talk:Niqqud

Comments
It is hardly possible to have a meaningful discussion of this issue without some examples to refer to. But I wonder if the problem is that the Wikipedia software is normalising the Unicode Hebrew text. In principle this is a good and proper thing to do, to ensure that the text is written in a consistent manner which can be properly displayed. But unfortunately there are some errors (which cannot be corrected) in how Unicode has specified normalisation of Hebrew niqqud. The result of this is that in a normalised Hebrew text the niqqud appear in a different order to what is expected by most existing Hebrew fonts - after each base character, its vowel points appear first, perhaps followed by dagesh, perhaps followed by sin or shin dot. The latest versions of the Microsoft complex script rendering software (Uniscribe, usp10.dll) are supposed to overcome this problem. But the problem may remain for those using non-Microsoft systems and/or systems which have not been kept fully up to date. --Peterkirk 13:55, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Agreed that concrete examples are needed. The problem is discussed in detail in the Hebrew version of this page, and my intention is to have it explained here in English too. You are correct that it has to do with the placement of dagesh (which appears after the letter rather than within it). The real question is: Why did this work properly on Wikimedia earlier, and why did it stop working all of a sudden? Dovi 06:30, May 5, 2005 (UTC)
 * I couldn't find an existing bug report for this problem which has annoyed me for a while now and since it seems there is also a problem with Arabic vowels I've created this bug you may wish to watch: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2399

Thanks!

Fonts
So, common fonts depend on a different order from the standard normalization? I don't think there's a solution to that other than "get a font that's not broken". DopefishJustin (&#65381;&#8704;&#65381;) 20:43, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I don't think you get it. All standard word-processors for Hebrew (and apparently Arabic), such as Word for Windows and Open Office all put vowels in this way, and there is no way to create vowelized texts without these word processors. Texts are copied and pasted into the wiki. All standard net use is this way too. The coding itself is changed, it's not just a matter of fonts.Dovi 10:31, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Precombined characters - NON-precombined characters
Jason's (Yosl's) page Recommendations for Displaying Yiddish text on Web Pages explains how punctuation is handeled
 * by different platforms / operating systems
 * used browsers
 * affected characters
 * (fonts)

Jason (Yos'l) asked me to compare
 * 1) http://mysite.verizon.net/jialpert/Yiddish/PartizanerHymn.htm (where pre-combined characters are used)
 * 2) http://jadesukka.homelinux.org:8180/golem/%D7%96%D7%90%D6%B8%D7%92_%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%98_%D7%A7%D7%B2%D7%A0%D7%9E%D7%90%D6%B8%D7%9C (where NON-pre-combined characters are used)

I am using Windows XP and Mozilla Firefox and both pages are loking fine. I could not compare the pages at Unicode level - page source did not show unicode entities coded as &amp;#nnnn; which would allow to distinguish precombined characters from NON-precombined ones.

Using "copy and pasts" from both page sources I could see that MediaWiki is performing some normalisation. This is required because else "duplicate entries" could be created using the different methods:
 * yi:User:Gangleri/tests/אָ
 * 1) yi:User:Gangleri/tests/%EF%AC%AF
 * 2) yi:User:Gangleri/tests/%D7%90%D6%B8

I assume that the following scenario could be the reason for "what happened":
 * original pages where created with unicode entities coded as &amp;#nnnn;
 * the page was using precombined characters which displayed properly at some platforms in some browsers
 * at some point when en: changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8 type wiki and / or "normalisation" changed someone made an "minor edit" but the page(s) where then generated differently addressing known "weekpoints" / "bugs"

Regards Gangleri | [ Th] | T 22:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Esther
I tried to get the dagesh before the tsere in the menuqqad spelling of Esther, and it was pretty much impossible... AnonMoos 06:22, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

automatically destroyed?
What does:
 * "But any attempt to revert to a version with the correct coding is automatically destroyed."

mean? the MediaWiki software deletes this version on it's own?! The Transliterator • talk 12:30, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Jonathan
I use Firefox in Windows and I also get rendering problems. I don't think it is a font issue, as I can just copy/paste the text in Word, use the same font, and it gets rendered fine. I believe this is a FF issue.

On Windows, IE7 works much better than FF in Hebrew vowel rendering. Opera and Safari both have the same problems as FF. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.96.163.10 (talk) 15:34, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

The BabelPad Unicode text editor for Windows and the custom normalization for Hebrew
BabelPad is a powerful Unicode text editor for the Windows platform. The most recent versions have an option for the custom normalization of Hebrew text. This option implements the special Canonical Combining Class scheme recommended in the SBL Hebrew Font manual issued by the Society of Biblical Literature. This may prove useful for repairing damaged Hebrew text. DFH (talk) 19:10, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Needs update
In case anybody wonders... This page's current contents are quite outdated. They mostly discuss bugs that were happening on old operating systems and web browsers, that are hardly used by anybody today. Most of the current content should be summarized to one short paragraph and removed entirely when these operating systems and browsers go totally out of use.

However, a modern guide for using niqqud would be quite useful. I might find time to write one some day, but feel free to do it yourself, as I've got a bunch of other things on my plate :) --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 06:51, 10 September 2017 (UTC)