More on Non-Western Alphabets, Bar Mitzvah T-Shirts

After talking with an Observant Jewish friend, I got the idea for a design I felt might be a bit more appropriate for a Bar Mitzvah t-shirt.

Design Sketch

Jewish men tend to have strong memories of the parshah (weekly Torah and Haftorah (Prophets) readings) they were required to learn for the public synagogue performance that defines most modern B'nai Mitzvah (Bar Mitzvahs). The readings are tied to specific weeks of the Jewish calendar. I came up with the graphic idea of a Torah scroll, open for reading, with the Bar (or Bat) Mitzvah's Jewish name, along with the parshah and date (intended to be written in Hebrew). I used "David ben Avraham" as a generic male name, and since my Hebrew and Jewish learning isn't that great and I wasn't at home when sketching, I chose the parshah "Vayyera" as one whose name I remembered, sketching it in English to be customized in Hebrew for any particular Bar Mitzvah.

Once I got home, I used a couple of brush markers to ink the outlines of the scroll, imported it into my graphics programs, and uploaded it into Design Space.

Note that the lines have been thickened, and the rollers colored in a single (flat) brown to make them easier to cut and weed. (I have since added a white underlayer for the parchment.)

Following the method I outlined in my previous post, I added my sample Bar Mitzvah boy's name and the words "Bar Mitzvah" in Photoshop and curved the text appropriately:

Vertical Text Typing Reversal

The problem came when I started trying to insert the vertical text in Photoshop: because I forgot to check the "switch orientation" icon, the letters were jumbled together, and when I started separating them by putting each on a separate line, they disappeared... and then they appeared, in reverse order. Even when I copied my text into vertical orientation, they were in reverse order... until I typed in my text into Character Map as it normally read.

So, if you are looking to include vertical text in a right-to-left language, you will need to remember to not reverse the order of your letters, with a notable exception:

"Ki Tetze"

I changed my sample parshah from "Vayyera" to "Ki Tetze" (כִּי־תֵצֵא‬) when I started blocking out my text. My main reason for this was a shorter name. That said, it's two words, and the last letter (yad) of the first word doesn't go all the way down to the baseline. 

Because I was having trouble getting vertical text in Photoshop, I selected a system font with Hebrew characters and copied my text into Design Space. At first, the typeface I'd originally chosen didn't show up in my system fonts there, but that was because I'd forgotten to refresh the tab to refresh my system fonts index.

Regardless of whether I entered text in Photoshop, Illustrator, or Design Space, I had to play around with line spacing to get the letters to appear as cohesive words, and with the size of my text box to make sure all those letters appeared in the text object. That said, the vertical orientation — and what I could do with it — varied from program to program.

Slanted Text

Because Design Space keeps each text block as a separately editable, but not warpable, object, rotating the text was sufficient to get it to align with the torah scroll. That said, the amount of difference in line spaces, along with the common use of the character yad as a vowel, required me to put "Ki" (kaf-yad) on a single line, with "Tetze" following as a separate vertically-aligned word.

Both Photoshop and Illustrator have better line spacing, however, keeping my letters as text causes them to handle text rotation differently from Design Space, as well as differently from each other.

Since Design Space treats each text object as a single, image-like object, using the rotation handle to rotate my vertical text ends up perfectly aligned to my slanted rolled parchment, even though each letter is on a separate line. If I place each letter on a separate line in Illustrator, rotating my object will cause my letters remain upright, but indent each line to follow the object's slant. 

Both Illustrator and Photoshop have text-orientation toggles that let you type normally, but format your letters vertically. In CS4, which is the (admittedly-ancient) version of Creative Suite I'm working with, the toggle is under the "Type" menu in Illustrator. In Photoshop, with the text tool selected, it's a small "T" with vertical and horizontal arrows that appears just to the left of the typeface selector on the text ribbon. That said, I had to rasterize my vertical text in Photoshop — making it ineditable — before I could rotate it. 

Finding New Faces

Being that I'm looking at doing some more artistic work with Hebrew text, I looked for and installed several dozen different free Hebrew typefaces I found at sources such as WebToolHub, FontSpace, Free Hebrew Font, AlefAlefAlef and the Open Siddur Project. I was looking primarily for a couple of faces in Hebrew "script", of which I had none in my collection, as well as some variations in display fonts that would make for interesting (and potentially marketable) items.

These showed up nicely in Photoshop and Illustrator as expected, but didn't show up in Design Space until I saved my project and reloaded the tab.

Dates?

I'm sufficiently unfamiliar with the system of using Hebrew letters for numbers that it's going to take some more work before I'm able to complete the left-hand scroll with a reasonable sample Hebrew date.