Hebrew Keyboard For Mac

The Hebrew Typography weblog Hebrew and related resources Type Tips: The very very basics of for songsheets and CD notes. Bibliography of print resources The Hebrew Typography Weblog Other Ivritype pages of interest: Alternative Hebrew Type/Computer resources the US source for Hebrew-useful bidirectional Adobe products (also sponsors of this Hebrew Type blog) is the distributor of ME software from Adobe and other vendors in Israel., a fascinating project led by Dr. Ittai Joseph Tamari on Ashkenazic Hebrew typography.

An amazing database. (English parts of the descriptive part of the website are currently being redone.) Luc Devroye's great source of excellent OpenType Hebrew fonts, another Hebrew vendor of OpenType fonts with vowels (nikud). Looks like an excellent collection of Unicode-encoded Hebrew fonts, many (all?) free.

Got the link from the page., Ben has created a slew of interesting Hebrew fonts, available for free download, but in Windows TTF format, only. Open Source multilingual Word-compatible editor John Tiro has created a very complete free Unicode-encoded Hebrew font modeled on early, traditional Hebrew type designs for the. As the society's name indicates, the font includes trup, vowels, and even the Yiddish composites. I look forward to hearing from folks how well this works in practice in setting Torah portions with trup.

Andy Tannenbaum's Other Hebrew Typographers Jerusalem-based Raphael Freeman also seems to know a lot about using InDesign. A great resource. When you install Hebrew resources on a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, the layout defaults to one based on Israeli Hebrew typewriters. There are a host of utilities to change the layouts to ones that are more phonetic, or to work around awkwardnesses in the way each platform accesses vowels or special Yiddish characters. I will include links to such utilities where I know them, but my own practice has been to simply learn the standard keyboard. Then, on almost any computer with Hebrew resources, I can type.

(The Israeli Hebrew keyboard layout makes no less sense that QWERTY, but no more sense, either.) Installing Hebrew For Windows, the following pages seem to provide the most coherent, easy-to-follow directions:. Windows XP:. Windows 2000:. Windows 2000: On the Macintosh, you can easily add Hebrew resources as you install/update your system. Here is Apple's PDF on installing the Hebrew Kit: For Linux, consult the Israeli Linux Users Group:.

Paragraph Directionality The most common problem beginners encounter when typing in Hebrew or Yiddish (other than figuring out how to use the cursor and delete keys, which now work backwards) is what happens at the end of the sentence. You press the 'period' or other punctuation mark and the mark displays on the wrong side of your sentence.

You try again, being careful to use the punctuation from the Hebrew keyboard layout and the same thing happens. You give up and start your next sentence and the punctuation magically moves to the right location. What happened? The default in most word processors is to assume that paragraphs are in English, even if you are currently typing Hebrew or Yiddish.

Therefore, when you get to punctuation, the computer first defaults to showing the punctuation as it would properly appear if you were typing a bit of Hebrew or Yiddish in the middle of an English paragraph. There is a simple solution.

In your paragraph format (do this in your style sheet if you will be doing a lot of Hebrew/Yiddish; otherwise, you can just use the Format-Paragraph menu (as in Word) to indicate that the paragraph's default direction is right-to-left, and that it aligns right (it is almost never a good idea to justify word-processed or HTML-ized text). Windows These layouts come from a microsoft site that provides keyboard layouts for all microsoft keyboards:.

You'll notice that the popup with the keyboard layouts works with Internet Explorer, but not Mozilla. Use of these layouts for Hebrew and Yiddish is an awful kludge.

Hebrew Keyboard With Vowels For Mac

The first part is simple. At the bottom on your screen you'll see a small logo that indicates language: EN for English, HE for Hebrew. Use your mouse to change to Hebrew mode.

In Hebrew mode the unshift keyboard has all of the old Hebrew typewriter keys. If you are typing Hebrew without vowels, this is the easiest way to go. To get the special Yiddish vav-vav, vav-yud, yud-yud keys, or the Euro symbol, Israeli New Shekel symbol, or the rafe (the bar that goes on top of the beth and peh in Yiddish), you need to hold down the right-hand ALT key (called, in technical literature, the AltGr key). The fun begins when you need vowels. There are not composite characters for the Yiddish aleph-pasakh or aleph-kamats, so even for Yiddish, and certainly for most songs, poetry, or any Hebrew with vowels, life is slightly more complicated.

First, press the CAPS LOCK key. This lets you access vowels in the SHIFT-NUMBER row (see the layout). You'll also see that you can type the regular Hebrew characters in this mode also pressing the SHIFT key (pressing SHIFT while in Hebrew mode when the CAPS LOCK key is not depressed gives you English letters).

Note, however, that to get the AltGr characters, you leave the SHIFT key undepressed. So, for typing Yiddish you would normally leave the CAPS LOCK key depressed and hold down the SHIFT key for each character, EXCEPT for those characters accessed via AltGr, in which case, with the CAPS LOCK still depressed (and irrelevant to whether or not the CAPS LOCK key is depressed) you ignore the SHIFT key and press the AltGr key to access the characters on that layout.

It is hard to explain, awkward to use, but your fingers will ge the hang of it with a little practice. Macintosh Hebrew Mark David has done a layout chart for Macintosh Hebrew at. (There are several other keyboards layouts and proposed keyboard layouts, as well.) I haven't worked with Hebrew on the Mac since System 7. I'm looking forward to doing so soon. The layout shown here is from Mark's UYIP (Understanding Yiddish Information Processing) site; visit that location for additional explanations and context: Linux Hebrew I haven't worked with Linux Hebrew, but this page, by the Israeli Linux users Group, looks promising:. The real issue, of course, comes down to Hebrew support within a specific Windowing (or terminal) environment.

Hebrew Keyboard For Macbook Pro

Go to  System Preferences Language & Text Input Sources. Make sure an entry for each of 'English', 'Hebrew' and 'Russian' are checked. (I don't know which encoding you'll choose, e.g. 'Hebrew' or 'Hebrew - QWERTY'). Also ensure the uppermost box, 'Keyboard & Character Viewer' is checked. Now you'll have something that looks like this: You can select your language with the mouse or you can activate keyboard shortcuts, as seen below: Both these keyboard shortcuts are already taken by other functions. These are functions that I use far more frequently than when I want to, in my case, shift between 'Australian' and 'Thai'.

Hebrew Keyboard Layout Mac

So in my case it's not worth making a keyboard shortcut to switch languages. This may be different for you however. If you wish to activate, say, ⌘Space, you'll first need to disown that from whatever is currently using it. In my case ⌘Space opens a Spotlight search box and I use this all the time.

According to the Language & Text preference pane, the shortcuts are: ⌘- space (command-space) - previous input source ⌥⌘- space (command-option-space) - next input source Of course these shortcuts are already being used by Spotlight, so if you have that active they won't work. Fortunately, you can just click the Keyboard Shortcuts button to choose the command shortcuts you'd prefer. Either way, you should see an Input menu in your menu bar, probably next to the battery indicator. If you don't, you need to go to System Preferences Language & Text, click on 'Input Sources', and check the languages you want to have added. At that point, the Input menu will show up and you'll be able to set the keyboard shortcuts. Note that you can also just choose the language you prefer from the Input menu if you don't care about using a keyboard shortcut.

After adding desired input sources as, you need to check the Shortcuts tab (in my case System Preferences Language & Region Keyboard Preferences Shortcuts) to check whether all your input sources are checked. Then you can see the shortcuts to switch between them. And of course you can change them if you want.

But remember, if you see the alarm icon beside the shortcut, it means some other option uses this shortcut key already, so you have to change one of those shortcut keys as a shortcut key has to be unique.