Editing Yiddish documents on a Mac, final act
By glazou on Wednesday 3 February 2010, 10:39 - Mac - Permalink
Let me summarize in a few words only : forget it outside of a Windows or Linux VM.
My dad is a yiddish teacher, senior level. That implies he has to edit yiddish texts full of hebrew words, and a few latin1 prose. He needs excellent bidi support, columns, full support of all hebraic diacritics, nice looking fonts (like David on Windows), superior printing. He also needs a keyboard layout specially made for typing yiddish on a Mac AZERTY (french) keyboard. I made on using Ukelele. It uses unicode chars in ranges 0590-05F2, FB1F-FB1F, FB2A-FB4F plus a few needed ASCII stuff.
- iWork 09's Pages just sucks. Totally. It's amazing how lame at I18N it is and how Apple has been unresponsive to the hundreds of user feedback in the last 5 years. Impossible to declare a rtl document and here's what Pages shows when I type my name in yiddish, so " דאַניעל גלאַזמאַנ "(BTW, Firefox on Mac sucks on that, the two words are inverted despite a bidi override ! Safari is OK, all browsers in Windows are OK).
- Microsoft Office for Mac is not better... It can do vertical text but not rtl ! Its handling of hebraic diacritics is lame and whitespace is always considered ltr even if the keyboard is in a rtl language. In the screenshot below, and if you except the fact the diacritics are badly placed, it read glazman daniel instead of daniel glazman.
- As I said in the past, OpenOffice for OS X is the best option here: it can do rtl, columns, and is globally superior to competitors, no question on that. But it's far from perfect because it can mess up documents with columns in DOC format and worse it can lose some character styles (bold or italic for instance) :-( I tried font substitution but it did not help because no font on OS X is perfect to the point you can safely forget about bugs.
- I even bought Mellel. With Mellel, I discovered that even a font provided by Apple is not reliable. See below a pasekh-aleph (FB2E) on the left hand side and an aleph with pasekh (05D0+05B7) on the right hand side... Mellel is not guilty here, it's Mac OS X, its fonts and its font support. Mellel is definitely the best solution (with OOo) for editing new rtl text on a Mac. But if you want to edit existing DOC or RTF documents that use italic and/or columns, you may end up with very strange results or worse, uneditable results. All in all, the cost of tweaking again inside Mellel a document created in WinWord can be prohibitive...
- Using a Windows font on Mac like the David one can be, well, surprising. It works usually much better on Windows ! Forget it. As I said above, even fonts provided by OS X itself suck. See below the pasekh aleph (too high !) being here FB2E and not
05D0+05B7...
A vav with dagesh is even more surprising:
It's a pity but the hebrew fonts on Mac are not usable in a serious environment, period.
In the end, I gave up. My dad now runs a Windows VM on his MacBookPro and uses MS Office. The speed is absolutely acceptable, thanks to the last MBPs and the most recent VM packages. The David fonts are superb for his work and there is no visual difference between "chars with a diacritic in two glyphs" and "chars with a diacritic in one glyph". The diacritics are perfectly handled. Printing is as usual superb. Compatibility is of course not an issue any more. So I downloaded the MS Keyboard Layout Creator and made a yiddish layout for french MBP keyboard...
It's sad. I am really disappointed to discover how bad Apple is at handling hebrew and arabic in an editor. Microsoft spent tons of time improving its internationalized text support in all its tools, and only improves the stylistic thingies now. I perfectly understand why. If you can't even edit or render correctly a given script, what's the point being able to draw a border-image around it anyway?
Comments
Amusant... un de mes frangins (qui enseigne l'arabe) a eu le même genre de problème avec des documents qu'il écrit en arabe (et aussi parfois en hébreu ou dans d'autres alphabets "non latins")... Moralité il tape ses textes avec LaTeX sous Ubuntu... la police Sheherazade est magnifique !
Ton Papa pourrait se mettre à LaTeX, c'est pas si compliqué et le résultat sera certainement meilleur ;)
@François: non il ne peut pas. Il a besoin d'échanger des documents avec d'autres personnes, pas seulement d'imprimer...
On peut essayer gratuitement Nisus Writer Pro pendant 30 jours.
http://www.nisus.com/pro/tour-lang....
Je pense aussi que jeter un coup d'œil à Nisus avant de se résigner à utiliser une VM peut largement valoir le coup (et le coût).
I suspect this just has to do with market share and priorities. Apple has relatively few programmers for what they actually do, thankfully open source components in their OS makes that mostly possible. Presumably their resources are a bit limited.
Yiddish has 3 million speakers according to Wikipedia[1]. Wikipedia also cites at least 17 Indian languages/dialects that have more than 3 million speakers[2].
My guess would be this is just a low priority since the number of complaints can't be very high.
I'm guessing more people complain about Flash crashing. ;-)
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddis...
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...
@Robert Accetura: hey, all rtl scripts have same issue... Please count arabic, farsi, pashtun, tucko-altaic languages using the arabic script. How many hundreds of millions is that? Enough for a market?
@Jean et jhz: Nisus est pas mal mais a également des soucis avec les diacrtiques (dagesh en particulier) de la fonte Raanana ; je vais finir par croire que Apple distribue une fonte dont les métriques sont vérolées. De plus, Nisus est incapable d'ouvrir un document Word (quelques dizaines de pages tout de même) créé par mon père, sans colonnage, sans effet spéciaux, juste RTL. Bref...
Pas de chance et c'est bien dommage. Nisus Writer Pro est très bien et j'ai hésité entre lui et Pages. Saisie en plein écran — sans fenêtres ou arrière plan qui viennent vous distraire —, export au format Open Office XML, système de commentaires contextuels pour stocker des notes relatives à un travail, presse-papier multiple, scripts de macros en perl, recherche dans le texte en expressions régulières (Powerfind regex), etc. Tous ces petits plus, en apparence insignifiants à première vue, ont fait la différence et que je l’ai choisi.