Typing Hebrew in MAC word 2001

[Donald Kaufman]

I currently have Panther installed on my G3 and am running Office 2001 in
Classic along with Word. I am finding it impossible to type in Hebrew. I tried
accessing the Hebrew under the disc extras and Hebrew.img and putting
that in the system folder and putting Hebrew fonts into the font folder in the
systems folder, then clicking of Hebrew language in languages and trying to
click a Hebrew font, no Hebrew font shows up in the Word font menu and I
am unable to type Hebrew words. In addition I have a cut and paste program
called typeright which types in Hebrew. When I use this and attempt to paste
into Word it just comes out in the English letters I had typed in the Hebrew
program. Does anyone have any help for me?

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I currently have Panther installed on my G3 and am running Office 2001 in
Classic along with Word. I am finding it impossible to type in Hebrew.

Right! Use Adobe InDesign, Mellel, or Nisus Writer:
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/#programs>

See also <http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/arabicmac.html>
The author tells you which programs can be used for right-to-left
scripts on the Macintosh.

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

Right! Use Adobe InDesign, Mellel, or Nisus Writer:
<http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/#programs>

See also <http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/arabicmac.html>
The author tells you which programs can be used for right-to-left
scripts on the Macintosh.

Hey Andreas,

Have you tried Word 2004 yet? Test Drive is free. So is Greek including with
diacritics. Use Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS or Verdana for bets results,
but they'll be substituted anyway.
Well, I answered that once. I think I'll just leave it for now... ;-)


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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PLEASE always state which version of Entourage you are using - **2004**, X
or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.

 

[Andreas Prilop]

Have you tried Word 2004 yet?

No, but IIRC I read in this group that Word 2004 is still not ready
for right-to-left scripts. True?

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]]

No, but IIRC I read in this group that Word 2004 is still not ready
for right-to-left scripts. True?

Unfortunately true... There are issues with the ATSUI engine in MacOS X that
prevent Office from supporting this (and Office relies on the ATSUI engine).
Other apps have the same problem. As far as I know, the very few apps that
support right to left implemented their own flavor of text rendering,


Hopefully, in a future MacOS X release the ATSUI engine will provide the full
support to right to left and the Office developers will add it to Word :-\


Corentin

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

No, but IIRC I read in this group that Word 2004 is still not ready
for right-to-left scripts. True?

True. You can type or insert the characters, however. No good for real
usage, but OK for reading and maybe occasional editing.

 

[Tom G]

True. You can type or insert the characters, however. No good for real
usage, but OK for reading and maybe occasional editing.

For Arabic this is a gross exaggeration. Word is unable to display positional
glyph variants or ligate the characters as required, so it is totally useless.

 

[Tom G]

Unfortunately true... There are issues with the ATSUI engine in MacOS X that
prevent Office from supporting this (and Office relies on the ATSUI engine).
Other apps have the same problem. As far as I know, the very few apps that
support right to left implemented their own flavor of text rendering,

All Cocoa apps do RTL just fine, and even some Carbon apps, like Mozilla Mail.
Office is the exception and not the rule in this area. We can only hope the next
version fixes the problem.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]]

All Cocoa apps do RTL just fine, and even some Carbon apps, like Mozilla
Mail.
Office is the exception and not the rule in this area. We can only hope
the next
version fixes the problem.

Do any of them use the ATSUI ??? Office is not the exception. Nisus has
similar problems for instance.


Corentin

 

[Tom G]

Do any of them use the ATSUI ??? Office is not the exception. Nisus has
similar problems for instance.

Nisus is way ahead of Word2004 when it comes to doing RTL. The fact
is that someone wanting to do RTL in OS X can be pointed to variety of
applications, but must be told to forget about it with Word2004.
Since Entourage seems to be able to handle these scripts OK, I like to
hope that some extra effort will bring this feature to the rest of the
suite in the not-to-distant future.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]]

I like to
hope that some extra effort will bring this feature to the rest of the
suite in the not-to-distant future.

I have absolutely no doubt that as soon as they can offer RTL support in
Word, they'll do it... Hopefully sooner than later. I just hope we won't
have to wait until MacOS X 10.4 :-\


Corentin

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

I have absolutely no doubt that as soon as they can offer RTL support in
Word, they'll do it... Hopefully sooner than later. I just hope we won't
have to wait until MacOS X 10.4 :-\

And I expect we'll get OS 10.4 (which is going to be previewed in less than
two weeks at WWDC) long before we get the next full release of Office Mac,
since 2004 has only just come out. Even if OS 10.4 fixes whatever is the
problem with RTL, surely Word developers will need to make _really_ major
changes in Word to make use of it? I'm not sure it would be reasonable to
expect for some minor update that couldn't even be considered until after OS
10.4 is out? Surely it's more likely we'd have to wait for the next major
release in a couple of years. (I don't know any of this for a fact, just
speculating.)

 

[Tom G]

Even if OS 10.4 fixes whatever is the
problem with RTL,

Paul -- could either you or Corentin enlighten me (or point me to an
online resource) giving more info on the "problem with RTL" in OS X
10.3? For folks who have been doing RTL with other apps, including
even some MS apps, on OS X for some time already, this rationale for
Word not having this capability is not exactly transparent.

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]]

Even if OS 10.4 fixes whatever is the
problem with RTL, surely Word developers will need to make _really_ major
changes in Word to make use of it?

I have no idea how big a change would be required so that's why I *hope*
it could be sooner than later :-\ As I was saying, this is all very
speculative on my part anyway.


Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]]

Hi Tom,

Paul -- could either you or Corentin enlighten me (or point me to an
online resource) giving more info on the "problem with RTL" in OS X
10.3? For folks who have been doing RTL with other apps, including
even some MS apps, on OS X for some time already, this rationale for
Word not having this capability is not exactly transparent.

I'd like to mbut unfrotunately I don;t know all the technical details. I
only know the current source of the problem relies on bugs in the Apple
ATSUI engine (the engine used to display unicode fonts).
Office relies on ATSUI a great deal to offer Unicode support.
Other apps using the same engine have the same problem.
Apps using their own engine can probably workaround the issue (that's
the case for many apps under MacOS 9 for instance which could write RTL
even without supporting Unicode fonts).


Corentin

 

[Tom G]

(e-mail address removed) (Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]) wrote

Office relies on ATSUI a great deal to offer Unicode support.
Other apps using the same engine have the same problem.

What does Entourage use? Something other than ATSUI?

 

[Paul Berkowitz]

(e-mail address removed) (Corentin Cras-Méneur [MVP]) wrote


What does Entourage use? Something other than ATSUI?

Entourage 2004 also uses ATSUI, but does not need to make sort of
compensations like Word has to for compatibility with Word Windows. If Word
Mac didn't make any compensations, then lines would be different lengths,
breaking at different words, in Word and Mac. Entourage doesn't have to
worry about such things, so it gets its ATSUI "straight". That means there
are some Unicode features which work more easily in Entourage. But it still
can't do RTL really properly, the same as other apps in Panther.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP Entourage
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 Entourage you are using - **2004**, X
or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions otherwise.