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.