There is a nice answer from W. Schuster to the vowel placement question in the archives at http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2011/059969.html (I didn't find it because the subject is "Misaligned Marks" rather than "Hebrew vowel placement" but it resolves the question.  (Idris's suggestions regarding options  to \definefontfeature were right on -- thanks) and I also learned more about \setupalign http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Command/setupalign

"I am trying to set some text in Hebrew with diacritical marks, and whenever there is a diacritical that's supposed to come in the middle of a letter, all the marks are coming off misaligned, right after the glyph rather than in the middle of it (or wherever they're supposed to be)."

Solution:

\usemodule[simplefonts]

\definefontfeature[hebrew][default][script=hebr,ccmp=yes,mark=yes]

\setmainfont[Ezra SIL][features=hebrew]

\setupalign[r2l]

\starttext
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ
\stoptext

Thanks all.

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Michael Ash <mash@econs.umass.edu> wrote:

Thank you. The unicode text looked good (although reversed left-to-right as I sent it) in my sent mail, and it looked perfect (corrected right-to-left) in your response.  But it did not look good in the digest email (all the letters were convered to ?'s).  

Also it's typesetting fine in ConTeXt except for the vowel placement.  Any suggestions there?  Thank you again.

Yours,
Michael

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس سماوي حامد <ishamid@colostate.edu> wrote:

Greetings, Michael,

On Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:15:11 -0600, Michael Ash <mash@econs.umass.edu> wrote:

Is there a standard way to send unicode text to this list?

Your Unicode text came through perfectly:

\textdir TRT
\hebrew
לָכֵן חַכּוּ־לִי נְאֻם־יְהוָה לְיוֹם קוּמִי לְעַד כִּי מִשְׁפָּטִי לֶאֱסֹף גּוֹיִם לְקָבְצִי מַמְלָכוֹת לִשְׁפֹּךְ עֲלֵיהֶם זַעְמִי כֹּל חֲרוֹן אַפִּי כִּי בְּאֵשׁ קִנְאָתִי תֵּאָכֵל כָּל־הָאָרֶץ׃
\stoptext

Maybe the encoding of your browser/mail-client needs to be set to "Unicode" ("Automatic" usually works too).

For high-level text-direction control, you may experiment with

\righttoleft
\lefttoright

as well as

\setupdirections[bidi=global]
\setupdirections[bidi=local]

Best wishes
Idris
--
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523

--
Michael Ash, Chair, Department of Economics

Professor of Economics and Public Policy         
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Email mash@econs.umass.edu
Tel +1-413-545-2590 Twitter @michaelaoash

--
Michael Ash, Chair, Department of Economics

Professor of Economics and Public Policy         
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Email mash@econs.umass.edu
Tel +1-413-545-2590 Twitter @michaelaoash