Hebrew Vowel Problem

etresoft~

Thank you very much for your advice. I am immensely grateful! When working in Pages, I had been selecting characters from the Keyboard Viewer without realizing I could select different fonts. Following your lead regarding fonts, I displayed the Character Palette, figured out how to enter text from there and selected two or three different fonts. My pesky sheva displayed correctly every time. I'll work on my project some more and see if my luck holds.

Since I rarely use Hebrew, I wanted to avoid an app for that purpose only even though I had heard about Mellel (with high praise) from another thread in this forum. I really hope Pages works.

Many thanks again. I really appreciate question answerers who share their experience and expertise with those of us who have much to learn.

Wish me luck.

~Dick

More than a week has passed since I last checked this thread. I really appreciate the additional comments I found, especially the link to Multilingual Mac.

Here's how I finally dealt with my problem. I used the character palette which you can display from within Pages by selecting Edit>Special Characters. That and the font New Peninim MT worked pretty well. It placed the sheva correctly in Final Kof. The character palette includes the consonants, vowel points and trope symbols. Moreover, for many (perhaps all) consonants, it also shows variations (e.g. bet/vet, shin/sin, tav) where a dot changes the sound of the character allowing you to select the character without having to choose an extra mark.

All in all, it worked well, much better than using the Keyboard Viewer which is far too hard to read and which was responsible for the sheva problem in the first place. Some annoying inconveniences remained, however: 1) It's impossible to back space over a single character to delete it. Doing so, deletes the whole line. 2) You have to learn which dot (Hireq) in the set of vowel points is going to appear above the character and which below. There are two dots to choose from and they look exactly alike. Same with the little hyphen-like mark called Patah. 3) The Hebrew hyphen which frequently separates words prints a little too high, I think. 4) One character seems to be missing from the character palette: a small vertical line that sometimes appears beneath characters, in addition to any vowel point, to indicate the stressed syllable. Compared to the problems I was having at first, these are minor issues.

~Dick

Tom~

Thanks again for your observations; I'll keep them in mind for next time. The character palette method I hit on, more by accident than anything else, worked well enough, so I had little incentive to seek better solutions. As for the meteg, you're probably right. Arguing that it was neither a consonant nor a vowel, I cheated and left it out.

Frankly, I forget whether I tried enlarging the Keyboard Viewer. It may have been that in my pinball-like flailing about for solutions, I got to the Character Palette before figuring out the various options for the Keyboard Viewer.

Another Pages failing, I discovered, is that saving the Hebrew in .doc format does not mean that Word on a Vista machine will accurately read it. Among other quirks, all the vowel points print to the left of the consonant in a separate space. Unless there's a magic bullet for that issue, I think I'll have to recreate the piece from scratch in Vista. But that's a problem for another day.

Thanks again.

~Dick

Thanks, I'll try Rich Text. I think .doc worked ok with Vista except for the vowel placement, though to be honest I didn't check it closely. The font seemed ok at a glance, however. But even Pages had problems reading the .doc version. It cooperated with rtf, however, so maybe Vista will, too. We'll see.