Nisus, Ibook G3 and Hebrew Fonts

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R Severn
Posts: 1
Joined: 2004-08-05 01:11:19

Nisus, Ibook G3 and Hebrew Fonts

Post by R Severn »

We have an Ibook G3 / 600 recently upgraded to OS X which is being used to produce a publication which is written primarily in English with a combination of biblical Hebrew and Greek text as well, and written in Appleworks 6. We are printing using an Epson Stylus 64.

Since upgrarding to OSX we find the fonts previously used are not supported and we can't print the document text properly. If Appleworks is opened in Classic, then our original text and fonts are fine and we print OK. We have been told that Appleworks 6 does not support Unicode and it is this which is needed to enable Hebrew text (althought I don't understand why we could use Hebrew fonts previously).

If we switch to Nisus as the word processing program my questions are:

1) will it facilitate writing documents which incororate standard english, hebrew and greek text,
2) if so, what font would be needed to enable the pointing required for Hebrew text and also Greek text with full keyboard functionality
3) will we be able to print to the Epson without difficulty

Thanks for your thoughts. :?
Helgegrimm
Posts: 1
Joined: 2004-08-26 06:24:06

Re: Nisus, Ibook G3 and Hebrew Fonts

Post by Helgegrimm »

Unicode support means that you have only one encoding for all the different scripts. And if you use Unicode fonts, you can write Latin, Greek and Hebrew (and Chinese and Japanese etc.) with one single font. AppleWorks in Mac OS 9 had no support for Unicode, it used a technology called WorldScript to allow for different encodings in one document. WorldScript is not supported in Mac OS X, that's why you can no longer use your fonts in Mac OS X. With Mac OS X, you need Unicode, and AppleWorks 6 doesn't support that.

Currently, I can only recommend Mellel from http://www.redlers.com

It has full support for Hebrew, Greek and Latin text, it's fast and should run great on the iBook. Nisus would also be a great solution, it supports Unicode, too, and therefore it can display Hebrew characters, but it does not support "right to left" writing, because Mac OS X does not have real support for this feature at the moment. Mellel, however, uses its own layout engine, and that's why it will already do everything you need with Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3. It can import RTF files exported from AppleWorks, but I don't think that it will import the Greek or Hebrew characters correctly, because AppleWorks didn't use Unicode. Printing to the Epson is no problem with Mellel.
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