We’re thinking about buying a Mac.
One of the things that has been holding us up is lack of support for Hebrew software. Until Mac OS X 10.2 was released, the operating system didn’t even offer native support for Hebrew. However, we’re still waiting for some important applications (such as NisusWriter) to come out with OS X native releases.
Last week I saw an email to the hebrewcomputing Y! group which listed off a list of some good Hebrew software for “real Hebrew computing” on Mac OS X.
- Mellel for word processing (full Hebrew support)
- OS X Mail app for Hebrew email
- Safari and Camino for Hebrew web browsing
- iChat and icy juice for instant messaging in Hebrew
- iCal for calendar with Hebrew support
- OS X address book with it’s built in Hebrew support
- Keynote with the Hebrew template and direction services for Hebrew presentations
Now all we need are OS X editions of the Gemara and Tanach.
The site Mechon Mamre (www.mechon-mamre.org)
has Mishna, Gemara, Tosefta and Tanakh, and
displays Hebrew fine in Safari, and backwards
in Omniweb. But if you copy the text out into
Mellel it works perfectly, and you can change
the font, size and spacing. Make sure you have
one of the big Unicode Hebrew fonts if you want
to use Tanakh with te’amim and niqud.
Try finding Vusillus Old Face or Cardo (which
I think is the best font for vowels etc)
Adam
A faculty member i work with uses os x mail but it wont put the periood in the corrct location…always the right instead of the left. Any way to fix this?
Try DirectionService — you can find it at MacMac (http://mac.plonter.co.il/)
You just select the line and choose -right to left- direction from the services menu once it’s installed.
Adam