Re: Entering Hebrew Text in Word 2004 for Mac

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Chris (cdiddy_at_dodgeit.com)
Date: 02/28/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 11:57:48 -0600

Paul-

Thanks for your extensive information. I tried one of your suggestions, and
typed the phrase שָׁלוֹם into TextEdit and saved it as an RTF document.
When I opened this document in Word (Mac 2004), it rendered the Hebrew
incorrectly (consonant order was reversed, and diacritical positioning was
wrong).

However, TextEdit, also has an option to save a document into whatever Apple
calls “Word” format (a “.doc” extension was added to my file name), rather
than RTF. I did this, and when I open this .doc file into word, all of the
Apple unicode characters were rendered correctly in Word, right-to-left, and
with the diacriticals in the right place! Yeah!

Additionally, I found that I’m able to copy/paste these characters easily
once they are in Word. They can be copied and pasted successfully between
Word documents as well.

For my purposes, this workaround is sufficient. Thanks again for your help.

Chris

שָׁלוֹם

On 2/28/05 11:08 AM, in article BE48900E.8AB18%berkowit@spoof_silcom.com,
"Paul Berkowitz" <berkowit@spoof_silcom.com> wrote:

> Word is Unicode-compliant, as advertised. Word is not right-to-left compliant,
> also as advertised. CyberTaz does not speak for Microsoft, and he was just
> telling you how to enter Hebrew characters one at a time using the Character
> Palette. As you have discovered. entering two or more characters consecutively
> - including characters you would hope to occupy the same vertical space - does
> not work in Word 2004. That's because Word 2004 is not advertised for
> right-to-left languages. It will read them OK - including documents made in
> Word Windows or TextEdit on the Mac in RTF - but you cannot write in them. It
> is not worth your bother to attempt to insert characters one at a time,
> either, unless they are simple characters that do not require diacritics.
> (It's worse for languages like Arabic which require ligatures: they don't
> work.)
>
> As it happens, this really is because OS 10.3 still doesn't have perfect
> right-to-left support. Apparently there are ways to "get around" it by various
> tricks, which some apps can do and Word can't. (This was demonstrated to me by
> someone from Mellel, which does do the tricks. But he showed me how it still
> was not perfect.)

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Encoding
    ... font hasn't been specified. ... that has Greek characters). ... Now, I have read quite a lot about Unicode, encoding, languages, fonts, ... I had a case the other day with an rtf file, ...
    (microsoft.public.word.vba.general)
  • Re: Saving text files with Textedit
    ... The Unix command line tools in Terminal mostly deal with ASCII text ... and avoid the use of non-English characters. ... The best encoding format to pick is probably of the normally hidden ... Was this an old file you were modifying in TextEdit? ...
    (comp.sys.mac.misc)
  • Re: Transferring Files from one drive to another
    ... That's a fair sized book if it were in ascii. ... >>> little file of a few thousand characters could suddenly grow like topsy ... >>> 21185 as rtf - just by having one single font and size applies ... >>> When loaded and saved as a wordperfect document the identical file took ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Saving text files with Textedit
    ... Easiest option in this situation is not to use TextEdit. ... and avoid the use of non-English characters. ... The best encoding format to pick is probably of the normally hidden ... there is a third standard: ...
    (comp.sys.mac.misc)
  • Re: Convert CString to unicode code points
    ... So if you are *writing* the RTF on your own, ... for each of these characters, ... (which is the default for CString in a Unicode app) ... the characters in my CString? ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)