[Biblical-languages] Unicode Hebrew on Mac
Joseph Weaks
j.weaks at tcu.edu
Fri Feb 18 21:16:46 EST 2005
> On 18/02/2005 21:20, James Ernest wrote:
>> Can anyone point me to good advice on Unicode Hebrew on the Mac
>> platform?
>> More specifically, I gather that MS Word for Mac under OSx can handle
>> Unicode but not Open Type. Are there Unicode fonts that will display
>> Hebrew
>> properly (right to left) with Mac Word?
On Feb 18, 2005, at 4:42 PM, Ken Penner wrote:
> Joe Weaks has an excellent blog addressing this type of question for
> the
> Mac.
On Feb 18, 2005, at 6:42 PM, Peter Kirk wrote:
> The problem is actually that Word 2004 for Mac cannot handle right to
> left or complex scripts. It cannot be fixed by choice of font.
> ...James, the moral for you is not to mix Microsoft and non-Microsoft
> if you want Hebrew support. Either use Microsoft Office on Microsoft
> Windows (actually OpenOffice on Windows should be fine), or on OS X
> use a word processor which is able to use its system level Hebrew
> support. Some are listed at
> http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors_macosx.html -
> although in fact rather few support Hebrew properly, as is clear from
> the screen shots.
James,
The only real news here is that Microsoft Word on Mac will not do
Unicode Hebrew. There are many other, and increasingly so, options on
OS X. There are options for running Open Office on OS X splendidly.
Mellel is fantastic for R2L with full support and heavily updates...
designed for academic writers, actually. Apple's Pages has R2L for
pasting in text, but encounters some problems when doing any serious
editing in the middle of a Hebrew section.
But of course, simple apps that use the OS X basic Cocoa text engine
have FULL support for R2L, including Apple's apps such as Mail.app and
TextEdit.
While Alan Wood's resources are fantastic and all, they end up being
counter-helpful (is that a word?), when they slip as much as only 6
months out of date. His screenshots for apps are all older versions.
BBedit 8.0 has good Unicode R2L support, for instance. That's why I
have avoided thus far an attempt at a comprehensive list for OS X
users.
James, in short, explore Mellel or NeoOffice (the java wrapper for Open
Office), if you're wanting to do just the basic sort of work you can
accomplish in TextEdit.
And I disagree, with Ken entirely. I think the blog he recommends is
just fluff. :)
My 2¢,
Joe
**************************************************************
Rev. Joseph A. Weaks
Senior Minister, Bethany Christian Church, Dallas
Ph.D. (Cand.), Brite Divinity School, Ft. Worth
j.weaks at tcu.edu
The Macintosh Biblioblog http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com
"All things Macintosh for the Bible Scholar"
**************************************************************
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