Supporting Hebrew in Apple iWork Suite

The following page summarizes the issues when working with Hebrew, and other RTL (right-to-left) languages, in iWork. It is based on input I got from the Israeli Mac community, specifically, the Mac-it Forums. The goal is to gather all the requirements and send them to the iWork product team.

Your help is required! If you know any other problems, please write a comment or e-mail me.

Thanks,
Zviki

General Issues

• Add an option for changing paragraph, and possibly entire document, direction between RTL and LTR. Either by menu, toolbar, etc.
• When entering Hebrew text, the cursor stays on the left side of the paragraph and does not follow the text. This makes it very difficult to edit the text while writing.
• Editing Hebrew text after entry. Currently, after the text is entered it cannot be partially selected or edited, it can only be replaced.
• Support bullets to the left of the text when working with RTL text.
• Combine Hebrew text with English and symbols - for example, braces are reversed.
• Import/Export Hebrew documents from Microsoft Office - currently, there are many limitations when importing Hebrew documents since the bi-directional features are not supported.
• RTL tables - in all applications tables are only LTR.

Keynote

• Text animation effects ("Builds") don't work with Hebrew fonts - the text disappears.

Pages

• Change the order of columns when working with RTL document.

Numbers

• Support RTL spreadsheets e.g. the entire document will navigate from right to left.

Comments

[Beeblebrox]

What does the selection of Hebrew fonts have to do with iWork? Isn't it an issue of the operation system? IMHO, we should focus on the issues that make the application unusable in Hebrew, and the fonts issue, is, I think, unrelated.

[pooh]

Kol HaKavod on the yozma!

"Import/Export Hebrew documents from Microsoft Office - currently, there are many limitations when importing Hebrew documents since the bi-directional features are not supported."

Just a small comment about this one (cause it is not sufficiantly reflected from the description) - rather than having limitations, it is IMPOSSIBLE to work with word in hebrew. I suggest to make it clear to them there is no resonable functionality to this SW for hebrew docs...

Again, well done.
pooh

[Yisrael Dov]

What is really awful is that the OX has support for RTL text, almost every cocoa application has the option to chose direction, but in iWork that menu is gone !?

[Oded]

The bullets should be for the right of the text

[Zviki]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I'll keep you posted on future developments around this issue.

Zviki

[Sarah Lipman]

We've got iWork '06. I love it for my work (which is in English), but it's pretty frustrating for my daughter (who works in Hebrew). We find that the Hebrew text is unpredictable in Keynote: one letter on the right might build but never will more than one letter build; the right half of a line of text might be visible, but sometimes all of it will be (as long as there's no build) and sometimes none of it. I'd upgrade to '08 today if I knew it would be resolved.

[Ron]

I filed a bug with Apple in 2006 regarding Pages '06 and its bad handling of Hebrew text (your third bullet above).

The bug is still open.

I'm very frustrated with this state of affairs. Pages is a good program except for its abysmal support for Hebrew.

[Zviki Cohen]

I'm happy to say that I'm a tad more optimistic. The Apple franchise in Israel was given to a new company called iDigital a few months ago. It seems that things are starting to move in the right direction (literally :-). They're working on localizing the OS X user interface and I know that they're participating in setting the requirements for the next versions of Safari. Let's hope they'll keep it up.