I have been pulling my hair out for the last two years trying to come up with a way to get vowels to display properly in anything other than Mellel. I would REALLY appreciate it if Apple would incorporate this into one of their updates. Until then, any Hebrew that I write with vowels is being done in Mellel.

Make sure that you have the Unicode version of the Ezra font. It is known as Ezra SIL.
Go here for all the documentation and downloads for that font.

Since Ezra SIL is a unicode font, the mapping is the same as any other Hebrew unicode font. So, if you use the Hebrew Qwerty keyboard, the vowels and letters are all in the same place. What you want to find is a keyboard map for Hebrew Qwerty so you know which keys to use on your English keyboard to get the Hebrew. You can find read a little about that here.

The OBSOLETE version of Ezra is SIL Ezra. This is a “legacy” font (non-Unicode), and you can read about it here.

KLT

areis74 at gmail.com

thanks!!

You said, “I know that WordPress can deal well with Hebrew with it default installation, even when you don’t use the Hebrew locale on it.” This was not true in my case. Prior to doing the change indicated in the post, when I tried to use Hebrew or when commenters tried to insert a Hebrew word into a comment, WordPress would replace the text with question marks. After changing that one piece of code as mentioned above, I am able to include Hebrew with no problem. You are right that there are a few issues with previous posts that must be hand-fixed (because WordPress was thinking that UTF-8 encoding was happening and stored special characters in the database incorrectly). I’m happy to go back and change those issues on a case-by-case situation so that the Hebrew encoding works properly now.

I know that WordPress can deal well with Hebrew with it default installation, even when you don’t use the Hebrew locale on it.

I find that Safari is a better bet for Hebrew fonts on Macs than Firefox is. A good test page is this one:
http://www.tanach.us/Tanach.xml#FontTest
You can change to a different font here:
http://www.tanach.us/Tanach.xml#ChangeFont
and then look again at the test page (since the pages are XML documents and not HTML pages, your Back/Forward browser buttons won’t work, so you’ll have to have them in separate tabs or use the Back button on the XML pages).

Unfortunately, even the latest version of Safari on the Mac doesn’t display Hebrew fonts (particularly cantillation marks) as well as IE on Windows. I have a write-up on my blog here:
http://beresheit.blogspot.com/2009/04/fonts-for-hebrew-bible-with.html

As a registered Apple developer, I submitted a bug report to Apple about Hebrew font support back in April of this year. The bug report is still open and I have not been notified by Apple that any work has been done on this (despite a follow-up by me). It would be useful if others could also contact Apple and ask for the Hebrew font support to be fixed/improved. If you want to mention my bug report (so that the technical support person who takes the call can perhaps bump it up in priority), the Apple Problem ID is 6755867.

- Ze’ev