Shalom!
I'm glad to announce the release of an experimental OpenType font under
the auspices of Culmus project. This is an instance of Frank Ruehl,
aimed to allow testing of Hebrew OpenType support in various
applications.
The font can be found in the Developers' area of the Culmus site
(http://culmus.sf.net), and it comes together with a Unicode test file,
and a sample postscript output which demonstrates what the correct
rendering should look like.
Meanwhile, I achieved the following results with most common software
environments:
1. Gnome - supported with Pango 1.8 and glib 2.6.2. This support is due
to the patch by Dov Grobgeld, available in pango 1.6 or later (included
e.g. in Mandrake cooker or Fedora Core 3). Dov also kindly agreed to
test my font on his machine, and the positive results of this test were
very encouraging for me.
2. KDE - supported with Qt 3.3.3 and kdebase 3.2.3. I believe all
versions of Qt starting from 3.2 support OpenType, but from my
experience the support is rather buggy.
3. OpenOffice.org - not supported with version 1.1.3 on Linux, see bug
16032 (http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=16032).
4. Windows - supported with XP SP2 (usp10.dll version 1.0420.2600.2180).
On some systems applications such as Word or Notepad display the text
properly, but tend to crash while using this font.
I would be glad to receive your comments or reports about the state of
OpenType support in additional environments. Please post your replies to
ivrix-discuss, to avoid splitting the discussion over different lists.
Best regards,
Maxim.
