Why do computer fonts that include Hebrew use weird characters? (Details in post)

Question

When I was taught the aleph-beth, I was shown how to write aleph like a lowercase h or like a mirror image of the letters Ic. Some books I saw (mostly commentaries on the Bible etc.) used the first option of those two, and were done in a beautiful font otherwise. Then, I saw other books, newer ones, secular ones mostly, use a much uglier sort of alphabet (personal opinion, no haters). Still legible, the differences weren't all that huge, I assumed it was something like serif and sans serif for English letters. The older font was all elegant curves where this one had sharp angles. The angular font was even creeping into religion! The covers on a Bible I plan to order have the same square aleph, Beth, gimel... is it some sort of fad? I did see the squarish letters on a Torah parchment scroll also.

Answer 1

What a great question!

There are a handful of "typical" ways to write Hebrew, AND there are different fonts.

The way we see Hebrew in the Torah scroll is the most ancient that we see today. It looks like calligraphy, and really is beautiful.

The way we "usually" read Hebrew lettering in the U.S. is as it appears in the Siddur (prayerbook) is also the way we typically teach U.S. students to read Hebrew:

In modern Jewish Sunday Schools, we tend to teach our students to *write* the "script" or "hand-writing" alef-bet:

There is also a school of thought that teaches students block writing when they feel the script is too difficult for their students. There is also the belief that using block writing will further students' ability to recognize letters to increase their reading ability:

From there, we have various ways of "Pretty" writing, such as on the cover of the Reconstructionist siddur (prayerbook):

Or in this Hebrew reader:

There are also most definitely dozens of different fonts:

And a combination of all of these as seen in Israeli newspapers:

I hope this has answered your question, and I look forward to assisting you again if needed!

Me'ira

(mih - ee - rah)