Anyway, one of the issues of which I was warned was that Microsoft Word for Mac would not support right-to-left Hebrew character input. But along with my new Mac I got Microsoft Word 2011, and I was surprised to find that R-T-L character input worked just fine using the Hebrew QWERTY keyboard. The only problem I encountered was that many of the keyboard strokes used to produce the various characters did not correspond to the unicode keystrokes with which I was familiar (and I'm not sure of all the implications of this anomaly). Nonetheless, after a bit of experimental poking about, I was able to find most of the basic characters and vowel points. I made the following chart of these for those of you who are interested. Please feel free to refine and expand this chart to make it more useful.
MAS
9 comments:
Your chart is not accessible. It is linked to a file stored on your computer locally.
You're right. Give me a minute. I'm in uncharted waters figuring out how to do this. Please stand by.
Well, in lieu of hosting it I added it as a .jpg. It's a little small, but you can click on it to make it bigger. My tech skills leave much to be desired. At least I have a Mac now.
MAS
The question is, what keyboard are you using for these input combinations?
I used the Hebrew QWERTY keyboard that came preloaded on my MacBook Pro. I tried two fonts, NewJerusalemU and Times New Roman.
MAS
You should try the keyboard designed for New JerusalemU font.
I'm an idiot. That helped tremendously, Bill. The HebrewLS keyboard works as billed. I am running into one glitch, though: whenever I hit a Shin, the keyboard reverts to L-T-R. Strange. Anyone else have this problem?
MAS
but how do you get your document to be LTR. I have been able to open Hebrew documents, but I am not able to create a Hebrew document from scratch.
That's a good question that I can't answer. On my computer (which has a Lion OS and Word 2011), as soon as I switched the Hebrew keyboard it went into RTL mode. And then when I went back to the English keyboard it reverted to LTR.
Do your have Word 2011? If not, this might be something they updated.
I will add, though, that after working with it for a while I ran into a few more wrinkles. I could enter Hebrew RTL, but if I went back later to edit what I typed (e.g., add a vowel point or something), the letters scrambled. IOW, you have to key everything in correctly the first time, because you can't go back and fix anything later. Still not perfect.
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