Copy from Hebrew bible to Word for Mac
When I copy verses in Hebrew from Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia 4.2 and paste them in Word for Mac, the verse gets turned backwards. Hebrew reads right to left, but something is messed up. So when I paste the verse it pastes left to right and then every word is spelt backwards and in reverse order. Can anyone give me a fix on that?
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This is a problem in MS Word for Mac. If you use a different Word Processor, like Neo Office, (free at www.neooffice.org) everything should paste correctly. Though, now that I think about it, I have never pasted Hebrew into it. Have always typed it in manually.
Blessings,
Michael Kares
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Brian
This is a known (and very irritating) weakness in Microsoft Office for the Mac OS. There have been extensive discussions concerning this subject on the forums of another Bible software application. The majority of opinion there is that Mellel is probably the best current word processor for handling Hebrew text. HTH
Jack
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Jack,
I called Logos and they suggested it is because Office 2008 for Mac does not have SBL Hebrew installed as a font. So I tried looking for it, but I can't find it on my Installation disk and so I can't install it. But it sounds like that wouldn't fix the problem. Do you use Mellel? I surfed their site and it sounds good, but is it worth it? Can a file created in Mellel be opened in Word?
Brian.
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Michael
How much do you use Neo Office? Do files created in Neo Office open properly in Office for Mac? I share files quite a bit.
Brian.
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Jack, you're right, installing SBL Hebrew into Office for Mac does not fix the problem. I've tried it.
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Brian,
Neo Office is my main Word Processor. The program can save documents as a Microsoft Word File or export directly to PDF.
Blessings,
Michael Kares
P.S. And you just can't beat free...especially since Mellel is 50 bucks!
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This is an old thread, but I came across the same issue with Logos for Mac Beta 3, the catch here is that when I paste from BibleWorks 7 (running under Fusion) it pastes fine into Word and/or Pages. Copying from Logos 4 BHS turns everything backwards.
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Doug Dunbar said:
the catch here is that when I paste from BibleWorks 7 (running under Fusion) it pastes fine into Word and/or Pages. Copying from Logos 4 BHS turns everything backwards.
I don't know about BibleWorks as I have never used it, but Word for Mac has a reputation of not handling Hebrew (or any other right-to-left text) correctly. There have been several extensive discussion of this in the Accordance forums, and the conclusion is that MS Office is hopelessly inadequate for this task. The most common recommendation is Mellel or OpenOffice (Is this NeoOffice on the Mac?).
Hebrew text pasted into Pages looks correct, but it is pasted as a graphic which cannot be edited or scaled.
I am quite surprised that you had success coming from BW, and the problem is not with Logos, but with MS Office. AFAIK, this will not be fixed in the next edition of MS Office for Mac.
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Just a thought… Libronix 3 and Logos 4 Mac and Windows all paste Hebrew into Pages '09 just fine. I've never had a problem with it and the text is very editable. That said, the kerning in Pages is not very good and the pointing in Hebrew can change pretty significantly as you increase or decrease text size depending on the font used. The pointing stays with the correct Hebrew letter, but may be shifted right or left, making it harder to read. Dageshes and cantillation marks can move pretty significantly as well. Mellel seems to do a better job than Pages with Hebrew text—it's an Israeli manufacturer, after all. Adobe InDesign page layout software does the best job, however you do have to have a middle eastern text add-in to do left to right text.
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Jack Caviness said:
The most common recommendation is Mellel or OpenOffice (Is this NeoOffice on the Mac?).
OpenOffice is available for both Mac and PC and is an open-source free office suite. NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice that is further tweaked to be more "Mac-like." Because of this, NeoOffice seems to run a few steps behind the latest release of OpenOffice.
My local church uses OpenOffice for all their word processing and presentation ("slides") needs.
I have copy of all three office suites on my MacBook Pro, and a copy of the PC version of MS Office running under Parallels, because I happen to have the space at the moment and Microsoft offered semi-reasonably priced student deals on theirs. However, as another poster said, you can't beat free!
MacBook Pro 13" 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo & 4GB RAM
MacOS 10.6.6 and Windows 7 Pro0 -
Seth Hewitt said:
Just a thought… Libronix 3 and Logos 4 Mac and Windows all paste Hebrew into Pages '09 just fine
I have Pages 08. It is good to know that Apple has improved the handling of Hebrew text, but I see from the rest of your post that it is still lacking.
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Thomas A. Wooded said:
I have copy of all three office suites on my MacBook Pro, and a copy of the PC version of MS Office running under Parallels
Does Word for Windows correctly handle Hebrew text?
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Jack Caviness said:
Does Word for Windows correctly handle Hebrew text?
Much of this is more of an OS-level discussion than an application-level discussion. Historically, Microsoft has done a much better job than Apple at supporting non-Latin scripts, although newer frameworks, such as WPF, have regressed in quality somewhat. Generally, you really have to work hard in order to get text to display incorrectly on Windows. With OS X, you have to work hard in order to get the text to display correctly.
David Mitchell
Development Lead
Faithlife0
