Hebrew/Aramaic punctuation marks

[denismaier]

Hi,
I have an docx manuscript dealing with Aramaic linguistics that contains vocalization marks that are not attached to a consonant. In Word this looks like this:

As you can see, there's this dotted circle with the two dots underneath. However, when converting to markdown the dotted circle is missing: with extra [ְ]{dir="rtl"}. As you can see if you zoom in, the small dots are still there, but the circle is missing. Apparently this is just some sort of placeholder. Does anyone have any ideas how I could preserve the circle? Or, how I should input the circle correctly in the word file. (I guess the problem is that the circle is not a real glyph. It's only there when the vowel points are not attached to a letter.)

[fiapps]

You could make the dotted circle explicit: with extra [ְ◌]{dir="rtl"}. I'm not sure I got the Unicode entity before the sheva, but it works in my terminal.

[rnwst]

The trouble seems to be, as you have pointed out, that this symbol is a MS Word specific placeholder and not actually a Unicode glyph. Therefore, you cannot expect that to be converted faithfully to any other format (since it isn't Unicode). However, there is a Unicode glyph that looks just like this, code point U+05B0. Depending on the font in use the dotted circle is either displayed or not. The default font on Github (Segoe UI) does not display the dotted circle, only the two dots below: " ְ" <- You can copy this symbol in quotation mars into your Word document or your Markdown. In most other fonts the dotted circle seems to be displayed, in which case is looks something like this:

[denismaier]

Thanks, I've now added things like these: [י◌ִ]{style="hebrew"} or [◌ְ]{style="hebrew"}. This works when going to PDF via ConTeXt. But in the HTML the vowels are not placed correctly. It seems to be a tricky question because certain characters are present in the fonts we use for PDF production (SBL Hebrew), but not in Noto Sans, which we use for HTML, and the other way round.