I've read that Microsoft never intends to bring their full feature set to Word for Mac, and right-to-left is one of the lost pieces.  We must bow down to our overlords in Redmond.  Mellel is a Mac word processor created and developed by some Israeli programmers.  It has the greatest focus on Hebrew, of any word processor that I know of, as well as support for many other languages.  .  Nisus Writer Pro is another word processor that supports Hebrew and right-to-left writing systems.  Both of these word processors can export documents in various formats, including Word.  However, importing into Word is not always trouble free.  Word doesn't always support its own rules, formats, and guidelines (some of which are secret), which makes it hard for any other company to maintain compatibility.

http://www.mellel.com/
http://nisus.com/NisusWriter/Features/Hebrew.php

I hope the student and professor can find a workable solution.

Derek

On Feb 24, 2014, at 7:22 PM, Otmar K. Foelsche wrote:

I had an excitement this morning with a Mac user who wants to type Hebrew. His instructor wants the papers as a Word doc. It seems that he can’t type Hebrew in Word for Mac; he can type it in another program (Libra Office?) but when he saves it as a doc the right-to-left order is not preserved, so the resulting text is garbage. I have only his word for it that Word for Mac does not support Hebrew, but he seems to have done some research.

I am not a Mac person and don’t even have a Mac on which to experiment. The professor is in a similar position and has assigned me to find a solution.

So—what we need is the best, or at least a good, Mac program to use for Hebrew wordprocessing which will save the text in its correct format to a document  which is readable by Word.

Any suggestions?

Judy Shoaf
University of Florida

Derek Roff
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>