Hebrew (or Arabic or Aramaic or Syriac) in titles

[rgwooden]

In 2008 Stafan Green asked a question about the problem with Hebrew in titles. It looks like no one answered his question. I am hoping for better!
When I enter a dictionary article (cut and paste or typing it in) such as the following: "אוֹר ʾôr light" (using Unicode fonts); Bookends will always switch it so that Hebrew is at the end of the article: "ʾôr light אוֹר"; the Hebrew must come first, however. It is not a problem for me in Word for Mac 2011 (although RtL is generally a problem), nor in Mellel, nor in Outlook. Does anyone have a work around for this problem?

Glenn Wooden

[kstephens]

My experience is that, while a mix of RTL and LTR text in Bookends always displays with the Hebrew on the right and the English on the left, when a document is scanned, everything turns out correctly. For example, I have this entry:

Screen Shot 2012-10-09 at 7.03.37 PM.png (5.02 KiB) Viewed 2981 times

After I scan, it turns out this way in Nisus Writer Pro:

Screen Shot 2012-10-09 at 7.04.48 PM.png (4.49 KiB) Viewed 2981 times

Not that it makes it very easy to enter titles with a mix of RTL and LTR words into Bookends. I usually end up typing the title the way I want it in Nisus Writer Pro (or TextEdit for that matter) and then pasting (as plain text) into Bookends. The problem is worse when there are several words in the two different scripts.

I believe there are algorithms built in to the text controls which Bookends uses which try to determine the correct order of words based on the first few characters of a line. Since the first word uses Hebrew script, it is assumed that the writing direction of the line is RTL. Word processors have a means by which one can specify the overall writing direction of a paragraph.