Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kirk Lowery <klowery AT whi.wts.edu>]

Martin Shields wrote:

> I just want to note that cutting from the WLC text available at http://www.tanach.us/ 
>   (using Firefox or Camino) and pasting into Mellel (http://www.mellel.com/ 
> ) using either the Ezra SIL or SBL Hebrew fonts results in an  
> extremely good quality reproduction which may then be printed as a PDF  
> file. Apple's Pages word processor and, I believe, the latest version  
> of Microsoft Word will allow PDF files to be inserted as though they  
> were images (but they retain the scalability and quality of the PDF).
>
> Not the ideal solution, but using Mellel certainly seems to produce  
> the best results in this instance.

In the four years I've had a Mac, I've tried a lot of programs. I'm 
running Leopard (OS X 10.5) and even the latest updates simply do not 
handle Unicode very well in general. Browsers, word processors, 
everything that relies upon the operating system bollixes nikkud.

Mellel is the *only* word processing solution for the Mac that renders 
utf-8 Hebrew combining characters well.

In fact, Mellel handles all the Unicode languages that I've checked very 
well. Fortunately, Mellel is very reasonable to buy, and for those with 
academic connections (as many on this list have), it is positively 
cheap. You can not only print to PDF, but you can also export to Word, 
plain text, RTF, and can import and read such files. I have not found 
any real problems in dealing with every day documents from other platforms.

Blessings,

Kirk
--
Kirk E. Lowery, PhD, Director
The J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research
  (formerly, The Westminster Hebrew Institute)
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
--
"Good boy, Dex!"
  -- Joseph "Sky Captain" Sullivan