Every Hebrew face in this editor was drawn by someone. They are listed here by their maker, with the licence each was given under. Nothing has been altered, subsetted or re-cut — each file is exactly as its maker made it.
Nineteen faces, and one of them carries this editor's whole idea. Ariana was drawn from “Nameless Poems”, a 1963 poem book by Ariana Haran that Meir Sadan found on his parents' bookshelf — a manually printed book, and in his own words “another filter on Frank-Ruhl”. It is the face a book of the Tanakh wears here before you restore it. Gagua has been on this site for a long time; the rest joined it today.
The scribal and the everyday alike. Shmulik CLM was made in memory of Shmuel Katz (1926–2010), the Israeli artist and cartoonist, after the letterforms of his hand-drawn Passover Haggadah for the kibbutzim. Hebrew Paleo Mesha is the earth-script after the Mesha stele — the letters as they were carved. Hebrew OpenType layout logic in several of these is by Ralph Hancock and John Hudson.
A Rashi face, from the Makor set made for typesetting Hebrew in TeX.
Ezra SIL — shipped here under the file name ShlomoStam, and properly called Ezra SIL. A scholarly face for the Hebrew Bible.
Montserrat — the Latin face this whole site is set in, drawn from the painted signs of the Montserrat neighbourhood of Buenos Aires.
OpenDyslexic — weighted letterforms for readers with dyslexia, offered throughout this editor.
Alef — an open Hebrew face, taken here from the OFL release rather than the restricted preview build.
MFT Torah — and a word about how it came to be usable. We bought this face for about $60: the letters only, without a single vowel. A Torah face with no niqud and no te’amim cannot set a verse, so AHAVA=ECHAD paid for the rest — roughly $2,000 to have the full niqud and te’amim drawn, and about $600 more in fixes and adjustments afterwards. The letters are Martin Mendelsberg’s work; the marks that sit on them were commissioned and funded by this project so the text could be set properly. Receipts exist, should anyone ever care to see them.
One of those marks we drew ourselves. The face came with its sheva as two heavy circles — blocks, really, the same shape every other font uses. We designed the diamond sheva na in its place, so that the sheva which is sounded carries a form of its own and can be told at a glance, in the letter itself, rather than having to be worked out. It is a small thing to look at and not a small thing to read.
Abirim is from the same house.
The Ashurith was learned, as a trade is learned, from a teacher of safrut: the shapes, their proportions, the crowns, what may be changed and what may never be. That teaching came from soferstam.org, whose courses we took and paid for. If you want to learn to write these letters properly — not to imitate them, but to know them — go there. It is the foundation the AE OPUS cut stands on.
And it was not cut in a season. We have been building these letters for thirteen years, beginning in FontStruct — a font drawn square by square on graph paper in a browser window. The earliest attempts are still there, still dated, and they are as clumsy as first attempts ought to be. Everything since has been the same twenty-two letters, understood a little better each year.
What we could not do by hand — and could not afford to pay anyone to do — was the fine work: rounding the rough edges, and setting every vowel and ta’am in its right place above and below the letter. Opus helped with that, and the cut is named for it. The Ivri took less, being the simpler script. But the thirteen years are counted from the first attempt at making a font at all, by someone who did not know how, long before there was any such help to be had.
The Ivri came another way: our own research, comparing and reconciling script samples until the letters agreed with one another — together with the teachings of MB, whose father is an expert in the Ivri script.