I opened an issue on launchpad and it was added to the Ubuntu Font Family Wishlist queue.
As an added bonus Mark Shuttleworth himself gave his blessing to this design effort (!)
It was a fun mail to start the day with 
I want to quote one thing he wrote:
It *would* be useful if you could start building up a Hebrew community that can provide early and accurate feedback to DM when they start the Hebrew design process.
And later, Paul Sladen wrote:
developing a typeface takes a very long-time (months and months), and although
work on Hebrew won’t be incorporated until the Ubuntu 11.04 development cycle,
it is very useful to start working on it now!
So, I really want to start working on it seriously (too bad I didn’t start this before August Penguin…)
This week I guess I’ll finish the initial design with the good tips I got from Paul Sladen and from Maxim Ioresh, but this is only the beginning:
A real OpenType font must be created and refined, people need to test it, to find where it breaks.
And there are more variants - we have to do the Bold font, the Italic and Bold Italic, and by the time these will be finished there most likely be some Condensed variants too… so I need designers, typographers and testers to pitch in, we have a bit more than 6 months, it’s enough, but not a lot of time for a community project.
Original post: http://tombigel.com/2010/08/26/hebrew-for-the-ubuntu-font/
This is fun! I love Open Source.
Nice to hear!
I’ll be happy to help with testing.
It’s me again
Can you convert version 0.7 to a .ttf file so people can see what the glyphs look like in actual text instead of just a list of characters? I think it could give us some very useful insights.
I will, hopefully this weekend.
I need to brush the dust off my font creation skills, haven’t done it for a very long time (Remember Windows 98? That long).
A I wrote, I got many good tips from Paul Sladen of Ubuntu and from Maxim Ioresh of Culmus Fonts and I have some work to do before I spend time on the technicalities of creating a font file.
Great, thanks!
More power to you. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know, I’ll do what I can
I have heard that Linux cannot render vowels for Hebrew. Is this true? Will this Hebrew subset support vowels?
I’d be glad to help with testing
[...] Hebrew subset of the new Ubuntu font is in the making and scheduled to to be ready in time for Ubuntu 11.04 thanks to the initiative of Israeli web [...]
[...] תום ביגלאייזן הוא מעצב ומפתח ישראלי שהחליט שההמתנה עד 2011 ארוכה מידי ושאין שום סיבה שאי אפשר יהיה להכין את הגרסה העברית של הפונט עכשיו. למרות שאינו טיפוגרף הוא לקח על על עצמו את הכנתה של הגרסא העברית של 'אובנטו'. הוא ציין שקיבל את הרעיון לאחר כנס 'אוגוסט פינגווין' האחרון – הכנס השנתי של קהילת התוכנה החופשית בישראל המאורגן על ידי עמותת המקור. בראיון לניוזגיק אמר: "אני תמיד חוזר מהכנס הזה עם רעיונות לפרוייקטים חדשים. הדליק אותי לראות כמה קשה יהיה לעצב פונט כזה בעברית. ומשום שהיה לי מעט זמן פנוי באותו זמן חיפשתי פרוייקט שיעסיק אותי וככה הכל התחיל,"הוסיף. [...]
Hi Tom,
sorry for not responding earlier – so much to do with getting the four core fonts up and ready for Maverick, and now also co-ordinating the design of the extra font styles and the Arabic/Hebrew. We’re going to be very, very busy in the coming four months. (and, shhhh… we’re starting to look into Devanagari, just for the fun of it)
I’ve not been able the above V0.8 as you suggest. Can you point me in the right direction? In the meantime we have a look at your V0.7. We’re currently investigating the basic structures of the design, in particular height proportions, and how they stand against the Latin. My feeling is that they should stand just short of the caps, maybe at figure height to prevent the Hebrew glyphs to feel overbearing in the overall concept.
Another issue that needs tackling is the range of glyphs to support. We have developed an encoding that follows the Unicode range but if anyone knows of additional glyphs, say historic forms, please let me know where I can find more info.
Bruno
Hi Tom,
check out the Ubuntu Design blog: http://design.canonical.com/2010/09/intial-hebrew-trials/
We’ve put up our initial work for that. Any comments welcome.
Bruno