Dear Judy,
Your user is correct; neither Word 2008 nor Word 2011 (both for Mac) has full support for RTL languages. However, certain Office applications (e.g., Outlook
and Powerpoint) do seem to support some simple RTL. I personally have more experience with OpenOffice (https://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html)
rather than LibreOffice, but I am guessing the "garbage" is related to LibreOffice's encoding when he is saving as a .doc. I could replicate the "garbage" when saving as Microsoft Word 95
(.doc) or as Microsoft Word 6.0 (.doc) instead of Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc) while using OpenOffice. So my best advice would be to check the "Save As" options within LibreOffice.
Apple Pages seems to support RTL so that might be a viable solution if he has it, but I ran some Windows/Mac tests, and here are some
files and findings I can share with you: http://ge.tt/8UjtmUL1.
- Hebrew Windows 2010 – I created a RTL document with Hebrew text in it using Word 2010. Both Office 2010 and Office 2013 should have full RTL support.
- Hebrew Windows 2010 to Mac 2011 – Using the previous document I created with Word 2010 on a PC, I was able to continue working with RTL
functionality on my Mac with Word 2011.
- Hebrew OpenOffice 4 – I created this document in OpenOffice and saving it as Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc).
- Hebrew OpenOffice 4 Garbage – Just including this as an example of what I assume your user is getting.
- Hebrew – This is a .dotx file or Word Template file. Feel free to pass this one on to your user.
He can copy it in the "My Templates" folder within the Microsoft Word application, and he will have a RTL template. After he does this, instead of creating a New Blank Document, he will want to select
New From Template… from the File menu.
Basically, as long as your user has one document that is formatted to be RTL (created using a Windows version of Word), he can open it and modify it in Word on a Mac. The template is just a convenient
way of never needing to track down a "dummy" document each time he needs it. Unfortunately, Office for Windows just has more features than Office for Mac (like color-coding shared calendars in Outlook or running its Clean-Up Wizard).
Feel free to contact me if any of this isn't clear or if you need more help!
Best,
Keah
P.S. I have also ran into issues where Excel 2010/2013 could not display Cyrillic characters when trying to export .csv files, but OpenOffice has advanced
options that lets you choose your encoding. Very helpful if you are ever working with spreadsheets or database dumps.
--
Keah Cunningham
Assistant Director
Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center
University of Kansas
1445 Jayhawk Boulevard
4073 Wescoe Hall
Lawrence, KS 66045-7590