Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 6:21 pm Post subject: Hebrew
I just downloaded NeoOfficeJ for OS X a few days ago. It is terrific. I was impressed (and amazed) to see that it even had right-to-left paragraphing. Hebrew, being right-to-left, needs this. Right now, however, as far as I can see, the only OS X Hebrew font that works well with NeoOffice is Lucida Grande. There are several Hebrew fonts that are more traditional looking and that have all the features needed for biblical Hebrew. Chief among them is "SBL Hebrew" (a free download). So, my question is: can anybody out there program NeoOffice to work properly with this font? (It works well with MS Office XP and with Mellel for OS X).
My guess, based on the information you provided, is that the font is a Windows TTF or OpenType font without the requisite AAT tables needed to work properly with the Mac OS X text layout engine. Mellel works because it has its own text engine that supports the Windows tables in the Windows TTFs and has more complete OTF support than the OS X engine.
The best solution to this problem, if it is indeed the issue with your font, is, as I've argued elsewhere (do a search for AAT in the trinity forums), to bug Apple to properly support the tables in at least the OpenType fonts (so those fonts will work with any Mac app using the OS X text layout engine). Filing feedback at Mac OS X feedback (or a bug report if you're a developer) is the first step. The more feedback Apple gets, the better (there are also a number of outstanding RTL bugs in even 10.3--no true RTL menus, for starters, which you'll notice if you download the "Hebrew language pack" for Neo/J and set Hebrew as your preferred language in the System Prefs).
It might also be possible to convince the font's manufacturers to add the needed AAT tables to the font so it will work with the existing state of the OS X text layout engine, but that's likely to happen only if the mfgr has a large Mac client base....
Sorry it's not good news....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Thanks for the reply.
You're right, the font I mentioned (SBL Hebrew) is an OpenType font. I hope Apple will do a better job with this in Tiger. I'll send them another nag.
or it will never happen. I do it times to times, but I can't be the only one or Apple won't do nothing, the most we are with arguments, the most chances will have.
M-Rick is absolutely right! I've done so before and will do so again (when 10.4 comes out and we're still stuck with crappy OTF support, limited glyphs in Apple fonts, and vendors who won't add AAT tables...). I've yet to report the lack of RTL menus yet because I haven't figured out how to frame it as end-user feedback yet....
Maybe we should set up a website to shame Apple into fixing these RTL bugs
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Thanks from me too. Know I know how to exactly give Apple feedback. Until today, I never understood my problem. I just used Mellel (1.8+) and Adobe Creative Suite ME to type with Uyghur (RTL) OT unicode fonts. But I've wanted to use these fonts in Apple apps.
Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2005 11:04 am Post subject: Hebrew speller
Hi to you all,
Excuse me for jumping in like this, but I've just compiled the hspell code to work with OpenOffice and got it to work with NeoOffice/j as well. Does any one have a site in which I could post it in?
My guess, based on the information you provided, is that the font is a Windows TTF or OpenType font without the requisite AAT tables needed to work properly with the Mac OS X text layout engine. Mellel works because it has its own text engine that supports the Windows tables in the Windows TTFs and has more complete OTF support than the OS X engine.
Isn't there some program that can compose the proper tables out of the Windows or Opentype information? I have no knowledge about this problem but just trying to prod the thinking
-Oscar (who landed a real job today and is now slightly drunk and very happy) _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Hi to you all,
Excuse me for jumping in like this, but I've just compiled the hspell code to work with OpenOffice and got it to work with NeoOffice/j as well. Does any one have a site in which I could post it in?
What do your compiled files look like? If they are similar to the files that are in an OpenOffice.org 1.1.x installation's share/dict/ooo directory (i.e. *.aff and *.dic files), then I would recommend getting them posted to OpenOffice.org's spellchecker download site:
If you can get the files posted to that site, I will automatically pick them up in my Neo/J 1.1 build.
I do not know the exact process for posting files to that site, but if you take a look at the following URL, there is a mailing list that might be able to help you submit your files:
My guess, based on the information you provided, is that the font is a Windows TTF or OpenType font without the requisite AAT tables needed to work properly with the Mac OS X text layout engine.
Isn't there some program that can compose the proper tables out of the Windows or Opentype information? I have no knowledge about this problem but just trying to prod the thinking
-Oscar (who landed a real job today and is now slightly drunk and very happy)
FontForge, or whatever it's called these days, is supposed to do that, but I've spoken with a couple of people who've tried to use it on Arabic fonts and they've all said it doesn't work/produce working tables
These are the kind of features I want in 10.4, and instead Apple redoes search once again....
Congrats again on the job, and keep the ideas coming
Smokey
(who just drove 10 hours, half of it in the rain, and is now very tired but completely sober ) _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Stupid me! I should have checked my Neo/J build files as that Hebrew dictionary is I automatically included that dictionary in the Neo/J 1.1 RC "ar,tr,he" language pack.
Stupid me! I should have checked my Neo/J build files as that Hebrew dictionary is I automatically included that dictionary in the Neo/J 1.1 RC "ar,tr,he" language pack.
Patrick
I'm sad to say that I too should have checked. Yet, I do not understand why the "ar,tr,he" language pack installer does not enable the dictionaries. That is, after installing this hebrew language pack I needed to manually edit the dictionary.lst file in order to enable MySpell to load the hebrew dictionaries. Is this a bug? Could the installer run a script to do this automatically?
BTW, the suggestion pop-up menu as well as the correction dialogue box all suffer from the unsupport of RTL text problem that is mentioned before in this list.
I'm sad to say that I too should have checked. Yet, I do not understand why the "ar,tr,he" language pack installer does not enable the dictionaries. That is, after installing this hebrew language pack I needed to manually edit the dictionary.lst file in order to enable MySpell to load the hebrew dictionaries. Is this a bug? Could the installer run a script to do this automatically?
If Hebrew is set as your preferred language in the System Preferences application, the Hebrew dictionary should be enabled automatically.
I don't uncomment these dictionaries by default because OOo 1.1.x has a nasty bug in that it will load all available dictionaries and, as a result, typing will slow to a crawl as the OOo code searches ever available dictionary!
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). I've yet to report the lack of RTL menus yet because I haven't figured out how to frame it as end-user feedback yet....
