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.)
--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <
http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>
Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
ignored.
PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
From: Chris <
[email protected]>
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.mac.office.word
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 10:14:34 -0600
Subject: Re: Entering Hebrew Text in Word 2004 for Mac
Alas, I don’t think Apple is the problem, but rather Word.
If I look at the first letter of what we would translate as “shalom,†or
“peace,†there is the letter “shin,†with a very small diacritical mark that
looks like a small cap “tâ€, which appears directly under the letter. This
diacritical is a vowel marking.
In Entourage, I can enter this in using Apple’s keyboard viewer by selecting
the Hebrew character set in Apple’s character palette. Because you can see
the Hebrew letters on the Keyboard viewer, it makes it easy to enter the
appropriate Hebrew consonants and vowels.
Using the example I just described, you get a letter/vowel combination that
look like this:
שָׁ
Thus in Entourage, I first type the “shin†letter, then the “qamats†(that
little cross directly under the letter), and Entourage correctly renders the
consonant/vowel combination, using the appropriate right-to-left text
insertion. This is rendered correctly in Entourage using either the
keyboard viewer or character palette.
This rendering in Apple works in Entourage, Adium (an IM aggregation
client), Firefox, Safari, etc. It does not, however, work in Excel,
Powerpoint, and, most critically for me and others, Word.
When I perform the exact same steps in Word, the consonant/vowel combination
is rendered consecutively, which is not correct. Rather than the over/under
rendering you see above, Word renders the consonant/vowel combination like
this:
שׁ ָ
This happens using either the keyboard viewer or the character palette.
This rendering isn’t correct, and I fear that Word isn’t really
Unicode-compliant, as advertised. Any suggestions on working around this
would be appreciated.
Chris
ש×ָלוֹ×
