Mac OS X

This refers to the X11 version of Open Office for Mac OS X.

Open Office English

• Converted all the fonts (drag them onto the Open Office Mac icon.

• Map NewPaninimMT (a Hebrew Unicode font distributed with OS X) to Arial, for PC compatibility purposes. That is the font is recorded as Arial in the document, (which is good for PC Word people), but displays as NewPaninimMT.

• Open Office will sometimes space this font incorrectly. Get around this by using a 20 point version, and vary it down to 19 or up to 21 (in that order) if weird things happen with the arrangement of the letters.

• On reload, some of these Hebrew fonts will bunch up again - however, in the final output to PDF, it may not be a problem. Try it and see.

• Save the output as a Word document format - it complains that some characters can't be represented in Word, but this is harmless. Some version of PC Word only show the consonants - Word 2000 (v 9.0). Later versions may be OK.

• The headers of tables have the font colour mucked up. Ie it appears as black on black. Go to the font colour pull down, and click and hold (in a couple of moments a colour picker appears). Pick white.

• Minimise the number of brackets ()/{}/[] , quotes ""/'' etc.

• Turn off auto-correct and auto-format, or really weird things will happen with the Hebrew. Much of this applies to MSWord as well.

• If you're really desperate, use the tried and true Foundation Hebrew.

• It seems not possible to colour a consonant differently to it's associated niqud (vowel). This seems to be a Unicode limitation. If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.

• Sometimes you need to change the width of a column, that is attached to another. If this is done by mousing, it impacts the other column. To adjust it individually, use <alt> -> column -> width.

• Sometimes Unicode does crazy things with quotes. For example, with להזדקף“ זקף.” it may try to helpfully flip the order of the words. Try adding the shorter word hidden inside more Hebrew Unicode, and taking away what is left. This must trick the Unicode engine into not engaging its help this user mode when it sees raw white space.

Bugs

• MacOSX 10.4.0 "Tiger": read Foundation Hebrew.