Bug 114637

Created attachment 138587 [details]
Examples of Hebrew punctuation marks

As you can see in the (soon-to-be) attached document, the Hebrew language, and many Hebrew fonts (including the ones we'll be using by default) have some special punctuation marks:

* A special hyphen (Maqqaf): It's not just different from the minus sign, it's also not like the en- or the em-dashes of Latin fonts. It's raised to about the top of the line: מקף־עברי instead of מקף-עברי which you get by just pressing "minus" on your keyboard. Support by autocorrect at the moment: NO SUPPORT.

* A special acronym marker (Gershaim): In Hebrew, when you write an acronym, you insert a special marker, Gershaim, which is similar to a double-quotation mark, between the second-to-last and last character in the acronym (i.e. the second-leftmost and leftmost character): תנצב״ה (rather than תנצב"ה using the simple ASCII double-quote character) is the acronym for תהי נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים which is a consolatory phrase about someone who has passed away. Support by autocorrect at the moment: NO SUPPORT.

* A special abbreviations marker (Geresh): In Hebrew, when you abbreviate a word, you follow the letter or word-prefix with a character named Geresh, which is similar to a single-quotation mark or an apostrophe. See bug 114184 which I opened about this issue specifically.  Support by autocorrect at the moment: NO SUPPORT.

* Special single-quote marks (Mercha): There are Hebrew-specific opening and closing single-quote glyphs, different than the ones for English/Latin text. Support by autocorrect at the moment: PARTIAL SUPPORT...

   * This is applied as a special case of the all-language replacement of double quotes with opening and closing double quotes.
   * There's bug 114575, which means the opening and closing quotes are switched (i.e. opening with the closing quote and vice-versa).
   * Can't choose which marks to use for opening and closing single-quotes, or rather - when you press the button to choose these, you can select the marks used for _Latin_ text.
   * No possibility of applying this auto-correction for Hebrew but not for Latin or vice-versa

* Special double-quote marks (Merchaot): Same as the case of single-quote marks, including the PARTIAL SUPPORT. However, there's an extra complication here: In Hebrew, the opening double-quotation mark has two variants - lower and upper. So in addition to the above,

   * There's no specific 2-valued option for choosing between upper and lower opening Hebrew double-quotes


All of the above should be supported, and all of them should have toggles for whether or not to apply them. Also, it is my personal belief (though some may disagree) that the Maqaf should a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y be enabled by default, and perhaps all of the above.

PS - There are additional Hebrew punctuation and cantilation marking for biblical text - which is sort of sung / ritualistically sounded out, but that's a bit esoteric for this bug at least.