Biblical Hebrew fonts on Safari

CVKimball wrote:

Glad you were able to find the site OK and that you had similar problems with Safari.

I found the site with little trouble. But I didn't have any problem in Safari when I used a web font.

All of the other good Hebrew fonts, Ezra SIL and Taamey Frank CLM don't work on Safari either.

Ezra SIL and Taamey Frank have more liberal licenses. You could easily and legally convert these to web fonts.

With three general, free browsers available: Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, it's easier to point out the problem to viewers and suggest they get another browser.

The easiest solution is to just convert one of those fonts to a web font. I used this site (https://transfonter.org) but there are several to choose from. You will need to add the web font(s) to your site and then incorporate the CSS file the converter site will give you. You will need to rip out that Javascript alert that complains about fonts and sets the font to "UNKNOWN". Instead, just specify the correct font and it will work on all browsers. You can do all of this in a few minutes. I didn't investigate your font alert. Removing that might be the most difficult part of the entire process.

The easiest solution to this problem is to just use web fonts. I scraped your Genesis page, hacked it to use a web font version of SBL Hebrew, and this is how it looks in Safari:

The top line is SBL Hebrew. The next line is "UNKNOWN", AKA Times New Roman.

However, the licensing for SBL Hebrew seems to forbid what I just did. You would need to find some other Hebrew font or contact the copyright owners of SBL Hebrew and ask for permission to create and use a web font version on your site.

PS I tried your Tanach page, and sure enough, even in Safari 13 of Catalina, which I am currently running, it complains that SBL Hebrew is not installed, even though it is, and some other stupid font is used. Firefox makes no complaint and displays SBL Hebrew just fine.

I have not tried to look at the CSS to see if there is anything Safari could be missing.

CVKimball wrote:

Thanks for your help on this matter.

As you may know, fonts for biblical Hebrew are very complicated.

Tell me about it. I once built a macOS dictionary plugin for the Quran. I had to use a custom SIL Arabic font that wasn't even Unicode just so it could match all of the custom diacritics required for the database I was using.

So maintaining a stable of web fonts for the site just for Safari is too much trouble, especially when alternative, free, high-quality browsers are available. (I recognize that Safari is the 2nd most-used browser after Chrome.)

No. You aren't getting what I'm saying. You don't need to maintain web fonts just for Safari. Just use web fonts. Period. All web browsers can use them and it will look identical on all web browsers. No Javascript alerts required. This isn't a hack for Safari, the is the proper way to do it for any web browser.

If you want to allow the user to switch between web fonts, go ahead. That is a bit more work to implement a Javascript style switcher based on cookies, but it is certainly doable.

For what it's worth, I think default iOS Safari looks better than MacOS Safari.

Unfortunately they removed your link (sometimes this happens by mistake). Is this the Tanach stuff on your Projects Page?

etresoft wrote: The easiest solution to this problem is to just use web fonts.

Nice!

Though the Safari default looks more like the ugly Lucida Grande than TNR.