About Hebrew

Since computers work naturally in English (i.e. Left-To-Right) and Hebrew is written Right-To-Left, there are several ways and a lot of arguments about the ways to store and display Hebrew text in computers.

Here, I'll try to explain in simple words, the main ways of using Hebrew in computers.


1. Storing Hebrew Text in Memory:

• Logical - Hebrew text is stored in memory exactly the way it is written or typed,
  i.e. If we type the Hebrew word "shalom" - the first letter stored in memory is "shin", then "lamed", then "vav" and finally "mem".
  
  
• Visual - Hebrew text is stored in memory exactly the way it looks on paper,
  i.e. If we type the Hebrew word "shalom" - the first letter stored in memory is "mem", then "vav", then "lamed" and finally "shin".

2. Operating Systems:

When displaying text on screen, the operating system needs to handle the way the text is aligned or "put" on screen.
The operating system uses Font - a certain component that defines how characters are drawn on screen.


• Operating system with Hebrew support, has:
  i) "Logical" Hebrew Fonts.   and   ii) Special algorithms to display logical text on screen, using the "logical" font.
  
  
• Operating system without Hebrew support, has no algorithms to display logical Hebrew text on screen, and usually has no font with Hebrew characters in it.

3. Hebrew Fonts:

• "Logical" - "Logical" Hebrew font has Hebrew characters in a special place reserved for the Hebrew language (defined by the Unicode organization).
  This font also has a special attribute that marks it as Hebrew (non-Latin) Font.
  Since the "Logical" font has a Hebrew character-set in separate place than the Latin character-set, no Latin character is destroyed by another Hebrew character.
  
  
• "Visual" - "Visual" Hebrew font has Hebrew characters in a place reserved for some Latin characters that are usually not in use.
  Since the "Visual" font is simply a Latin font (like those the OS already has), just with different "drawings" of the characters, some Latin characters are being destroyed by the Hebrew characters.
  

4. Display Hebrew Text on Screen:

Logical Text:

• Hebrew OS, with Logical Font - The OS uses the special Hebrew charset and its special algorithms, thus the text is displayed on screen right (ok).
  
• Hebrew OS, with Visual Font - The OS uses the Hebrew characters from the Latin charset and does not use its special algorithms, thus the text is displayed on screen reversed (wrong).
  
• Non-Hebrew OS, Visual Font only - The text is displayed on screen reversed (wrong).
  
  
  Visual Text:
  
• Hebrew OS, with Logical Font - The OS uses the special Hebrew charset and its special algorithms (that are used to display Logical text), thus the text is displayed on screen reversed (wrong).
  
• Hebrew OS, with Visual Font - The OS uses the Hebrew characters from the Latin charset and does not use its special algorithms, thus the text is displayed on screen right (ok).
  
• Non-Hebrew OS, Visual Font only - The text is displayed on screen right (ok).
  
  
  

5. Conclusions:

The main reason for using Visual Hebrew text, is the ability to display text in the right order, on every operating system - with and without Hebrew support.
All we need to do in order to display visual Hebrew text, is to make sure we have a visual Hebrew font installed.
In case we don't have that kind of font already installed, we can download and install freely distributed fonts.

The main reason for using Logical Hebrew text, is the ability to "work" with the text.
For example, sorting a list of words in visual Hebrew, would give us wrong results, since the sorting will occur according to the last character in the word, instead of the first.

The optimal solution is to use Logical Hebrew to store text in memory, and Visual Hebrew to display text on screen.
Actually, that's what Hebrew OS' special algorithms do - converting Logical Hebrew stored in memory to Visual Hebrew displayed on screen.
Any way we choose, we have a lot of work to do if we want to store and display Hebrew text on both Hebrew and Non-Hebrew operating systems.

6. Where to get Visual Font:

Visual Hebrew Font (also known as "Hebrew WebFont"), can be found on many web sites that use visual Hebrew text.
In my opinion, the best font available today is Globes-Sites' Font.