Hebrew Flag of Israel

Multiple Templates for Hebrew

The Hebrew language has multiple DBT Templates:

The template Hebrew (Israeli) - basic should be used for all braille used in Israel. The template Hebrew (American) - basic is used by those outside Israel to produce prayer books or Hebrew study materials. Several vowel marks are brailled differently between American and Israeli usage. These include hiriq, holam, qubuts, and tsere-yod. The Hebrew (Israeli) table also provides an option for partial vowels, which is not available in the Hebrew (American) table. The Biblical languages translator should be used by scholars studying ancient or biblical Hebrew and by those who need to use cantillation marks in the Hebrew.

The Israeli table treats English as a foreign language. The American and Biblical tables use UEB for English text.

For the details about the DBT translator used for a particular language, first select one of the DBT Templates used for this language.

Uncontracted Braille

Hebrew is usually produced in uncontracted braille. This means that words in the text are produced in braille on a one-for-one basis. One braille character for each inkprint symbol. Some inkprint punctuation may require more than one braille character. Showing upper case, emphasis, or numbers will add braille characters to the character count.But there are no abbreviations or contractions. If you have questions about how braille is produced, please contact a member of the relevant braille authority.

Non-Roman Script

Hebrew is written in a script other than the Roman alphabet. This may result in problems when importing files into DBT.Your best option is to import files from Microsoft Word or Open Office that are written in a Unicode font.You can contact support at Duxbury Systems if you have a file which does not import properly into DBT. Please send the file which does not import (the original inkprint file), not a screen shot of DBT.

Please contact us if you have any concerns.

Hebrew is written in a script that goes from right-to-left.

Duxbury DBT does not yet properly handle scripts that are read from right-to-left for editing purposes. You can open (import) a file, and you can translate into braille. But you cannot edit the inkprint within DBT. We regret this and hope to correct this issue in a later release of DBT.