A real Chanukah present for Elder of Ziyon readers

Over a year ago I came up with an interesting idea.

I am not nearly as fluent in modern Hebrew as I should be, but I thought that since Arabic and Hebrew are so similar, if I could create an Arabic font that used corresponding Hebrew characters, people who were very familiar with Hebrew but who didn't know Arabic letters could read and begin to understand Arabic newspapers. All you have to do is configure your browser to use this font for Arabic, or cut and paste the Arabic to a word processor and then change the font to this HebArabic font.

In other words, change this:

مسؤولون : قريع سحب ترشيحه من الانتخابات

قال مسؤولون فلسطينيون يوم الجمعة ان رئيس وزراء السلطة أحمد قريع الذي استقال من منصبه الاسبوع الماضي ليترشح على قائمة حركة فتح للانتخابات التشريعية سحب ترشيحه. وأضاف المسؤولون أن قريع اتخذ هذه الخطوة احتجاجا على عدم قيام الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس بتأجيل الانتخابات وبسبب دمج قائمتين متنازعتين لفتح ... التفاصيل

Into this:



With only a limited amount of Hebrew knowledge you can pick out the words "Palestinian" and "Mahmoud Abbas", and you see many words beginning with the "al-" prefix.

Here is possibly a shortcut way for Hebrew speakers to learn Arabic.

So I commissioned someone to create the font to my specs, and they did.

It isn't perfect: there seem to be different Arabic standards, right-to-left sometimes gets messed up, and altogether it is not a plug-and-play type thing. I am not doing technical support for this! But it is a fun tool to play with.

It works under Windows but I see no reason it shouldn't work on Macs as well.

Here is the font in ZIP format. Enjoy, and Chag Sameach!