kitty icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
kitty copied to clipboard

Pointed (Biblical) Hebrew Does not Display Properly

Open billsmith1234 opened this issue 5 years ago • 2 comments
trafficstars

Kitty will not display Hebrew characters with any diacritics.

I have tried letting Kitty use its own fallback font for Hebrew characters, and I have had no luck - it just displays a blank character, e.g, "בָ" does not work.

I have also tried setting the font to be used on Hebrew manually with various Hebrew fonts with the command:

symbol_map U+0590-U+05FF SBL Hebrew

Again, this just makes Kitty output a blank character.

Kitty is also unable to display the diacritics themselves, e.g., " ָ ".

billsmith1234 avatar Jan 11 '20 14:01 billsmith1234

As someone who makes fonts I'd be extremely surprised if it did work right. You're using SBL Hebrew font so I'd encourage you to read its manual. The problems with vowel pointed Hebrew are very delicate.

By the way, while much vowel pointed Hebrew is for Bible purposes, it's not required. Modern Hebrew can be vowel pointed. It often is in Israel in literature meant for new citizens and worldwide for Hebrew learners.

ctrlcctrlv avatar Jan 11 '20 20:01 ctrlcctrlv

kitty uses a character grid display for performance reasons and because it fits with what a terminal actually is supposed to be. It's never going to have good support for extremely complex scripts, because they simply cannot be rendered in a character cell manner. That said, I dont know what the issue with this particular script is, I will investigate, when I have some time.

kovidgoyal avatar Jan 12 '20 02:01 kovidgoyal