Hebrew on pages, office and the likes...

[yosi199]

Hello, I've recently converted from windows to mac and although I enjoy my new mac there are a few things that makes me mad.

Why isn't there a support for a RTL hebrew typing in pages? I can write in hebrew but It wont start writing from the right side of the page to the left. I was wondering if office for mac can do this?

 

[John Paul]

I know someone who is a Mac guy who is a biblical scholar (Old Testament) and he uses Mellel as his word processor. If you look at their site and click on the "multilingual support" box you will be able to pull up a whole list of the Hebrew-specific abilities of the program. I actually own Mellel and it's an interesting program. Very powerful but it has a tougher learning curve than other word processors, especially if you are already used to using another one.

Whether Office for Mac can do the right-to-left Hebrew thing...I really have no idea.

 

[yosi199]

Thank you I will check it out but I'm really interested in the office version on mac since I used it all my life on windows and that should be easy transition.

anyone else?

 

[plinden]

MS Office for Mac doesn't currently support RTL languages - a recent blog http://www.officeformac.com/blog/I-know-I-ve-spelled-this-right from the MS Mac BU says they have no plans to do so in the near future.

While we are adding new language support there will not be full right-to-left support for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. We understand that some of our customers need support for RTL languages, and we'll continue to prioritize our language support based on market opportunity and technical complexity. At this time, we don’t have any updates on languages or features beyond Office 2011.

 

[exegete77]

I use Mellel for all Hebrew/Greek work. Superb word processor (yes, a few wrinkles, but rock solid); saves in unique format, but can still be sent to Windows word processors. Nisus Writer Pro handles that as well; a minor issue is speed slowdown with many footnotes. And NWP saves in .rtf by default, which makes file exchange relatively easy, if those on the Windows side understand how to correctly open .rtf files.

For interchange, the most recent version of OpenOffice (3.2.1) correctly supports Hebrew. And I tried out the new developer version of 3.3 and Hebrew still works correctly. Now, the placement of vowel points may be slightly off, but that could be due to the font used, etc. But what I tried, it worked acceptably. I can exchange files with MS Word for Windows, as long as the fonts are the same, and few tables are involved.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Apple doesn't offer native RTL support. Ergo, no programs (such as office) that are developed using X-Code will offer RTL support.

 

[yosi199]

Thank you for all your help, I will now try Mellel and nissus pro but it makes me wonder what's wrong with apple on this end, I know that hebrew is not a common language but its still uses the same RTL like arbic which there are gzillion of people who speak arabic so what about them!?!?!?! It's like apple is light years behind on this end and its very dissapointing for a newcomer to the mac world.

Is there anyway I can contact/give feedback about this so that maybe one day in like 2022 they WILL add support for hebrew and arabic RTL?

thank you guys for the help.

 

[exegete77]

You might be able to mention it on the Apple Forum pages. Sometimes Apple employees frequent the discussions.

 

[tom@bluesky.org]

Apple doesn't offer native RTL support. Ergo, no programs (such as office) that are developed using X-Code will offer RTL support.

Where did you get that idea? The only OS X app in the universe which does not support RTL is MS Office. Every other modern Apple and 3rd party app I know of can do Arabic and Hebrew on a Mac. It is true that iWork and iWeb have bugs that will make most users prefer something else, but they still usable for displaying RTL, which MS Office is not.