I titled this post with a "one" even though I don't plan on doing a series because a major component of the specs for any product is usability, and for manuscripts that means
legibility so I'll probably be writing about it a lot. Last week I finally got around to getting certified as a sofer by the Vaad Mishmereth STa"M, the self-declared international regulatory body for scribes. (They used to do a lot of consumer protection seminars and things. Now they license sofrim under the assumption that if the scribe has an up-to-date license a consumer can trust him.) In true Israeli style this involved under one hour of testing and paperwork that blew up into a full-day ordeal thanks to travel time, waiting time, and another-two-hours-because-that's-how-we-do-things time. I can now compete with my friends' tzav rishon (Israeli draft board) stories.
Anyway, on to the topic. One of the questions on my written exam was "what if the leg of an ayin is horizontal and short?" I answered that it is passul (invalid) because it looks like a tet. No idea how they graded it, but I think I was justified the very next day while trying to read something in yeshiva.
This is one style of the font family commonly known as "rashi script." In fact this is the kind used in the older prints of books found in yeshiva libraries. Look at the tet and the ayin (the 9th and 19th letters going right to left); it wouldn't be too hard to confuse them if you didn't see them in the context of the whole alphabet in order.
