I am always on the lookout for good unicode fonts to use. I’ve pretty much defaulted to SBL’s fonts but I’m not 100% sold on their Greek or Hebrew (although their Hebrew is much better than a number of alternatives). Recently I came across this great breakdown with licenses (whether it can be reused and in what context), foundry (who produces the font) and style as well as a nice pdf showing different layouts http://opensiddur.org/tools/fonts/.
I tried a whole bunch of them and I must say, I was mostly disappointed.
One thing to realise is that Hebrew fonts are designed for modern Hebrew. This means that simple things like vowels are not prioritised let alone cantillation/accent marks (which are often completely absent). So although I really liked Alef Hebrew and David Libre, they both lack some more complex combined characters (with accents and vowels).
Arimo & Tinos
These fonts have all the necessary glyphs but neither one positions the sof pasuq correctly.
Shofar, Taamey David & Keter YG
There are some fonts that were designed with accents in mind: http://culmus.sourceforge.net/taamim/. As you can see, they handle biblical text considerably better than the others.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of any of them though. If I were to choose one it would probably be Taamey David but I think the old faithfuls are still coming out on top for me…
The Old Faithfuls
Namely, Cardo, Ezra SIL, SBL Biblit/Hebrew. Here are examples of these three:
One thing to note about Cardo is that it’s just a regular font that supports a large selection of glyphs so it’s likely to have a lot more support for weird characters than the others here which are made for particular use cases.
Something to be aware of is that the designer who made SBL Hebrew was involved in some of the fonts above (I think you can recognise his style).
You may be wondering what the difference is between SBL Biblit and SBL Hebrew. It’s not difficult to guess, Biblit combines SBL’s Greek and Hebrew fonts into one:
There are actually differences in the way some characters combine with SBL Biblit and the individual fonts for Greek and Hebrew so for better support for either language you’ll want to use the specific font. To be honest though, if memory serves they’re edge cases and so I wouldn’t stress… (maybe it’ll come up and be another post in the future)