On the SUNY Create Pressbooks, which is a self hosted Pressbooks installation, we have a book failing to export due to a lack of fonts.
There is some modern Hebrew in one of the chapters.
In the Book Styles area, its possible to add Biblical Hebrew, but there is no Hebrew or Modern Hebrew.
I wondered if it was because Pressbooks SAAS already has a Hebrew font installed at the server level as part of your standard setup, so that’s why it wasn’t included as a possible add on in theme options.
I have 2 requests (if I’m correct about my assumptions above):
What package or hebrew font do you think I need to ask my system administrator to install?
Could Hebrew be added to the list of additional fonts in Pressbooks Theme Options, so that having hebrew installed at the server level is no longer a “hidden dependency” for open source users/admins?
Hey Ed, sorry for delayed response – I don’t know how I missed the original post. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any additional typefaces intended to support modern Hebrew installed on our enterprise servers.
When it comes to supporting additional languages, the process that I’ve used in the past is to
start by writing a text in the desired language (with the unicode characters specified for the alphabet).
I then look at a webbook and PDF export to see whether the default fontstack for a given theme have glyphs for all the characters I used. If either of them look wonky or I see the dreaded ‘tofu’ blocks, that’s a sign that we need to add additional support for the language’s writing system.
I then try to find a relevant Noto typeface that does support the language. In this case, https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Hebrew looks like a pretty good candidate. We can then add this to the list of supported languages via a couple of pull requests.