Nisus Writer FAQs
Language Support (WorldScript / Language Kits)


Nisus Man

Question:
How do I convert PC Hebrew to Mac Hebrew?

Answer:
     

You have three options for conversion:

  • Use a commercial translator. AppleCentres in Israel used to sell one called Esperanto, and there is now a new, better translator called Ksharim. I'd imagine that in the US Davka carry the packages. Both of them support quite a few PC formats including EinsteinWriter and should produce a Nisus-readable file, retaining formatting and dealing fairly well with mixed Hebrew and English text. 2) Worth trying, if you have access to the PC package Dagesh. Open the file and then choose Save as... and save it as TEXT. You should then get a dialog with a wide variety of options. One of these is "Macintosh Hebrew." Choose this one. [Note, we have this on the word of a Dagesh user who is not certain of what other settings you may need.]
  • Use a text-only Hebrew DOS->Mac translators. There are many of these about and you could try looking for one in any Hebrew oriented software archive, such as Snunit. Einstein files are essentially text files with a few formatting codes, all within the normal ASCII range, embedded in them. You can will do the job for you. You would then need to go through the text and weed out the formatting codes, but that's a very easy job.
  • As suggested before, you could write your own program/macro to do the conversion. In Einstein, the Hebrew Alphabet starts at 154, if memory serves me right, whereas on the Mac aleph=224. What you need to do is to search for the 27 characters from 154 upwards and replace them with their Mac equivalents. Punctuation and numbers are more complicated as Einstein does not distinguish between the Hebrew and English versions of these, and uses an implicit algorithm of sorts to decide which ones they are. If the text is all in Hebrew, you can simply search for the Latin non alphanumeric and replace them with their Hebrew equivalent. If there is lots of English in the text, you may as well forget about this option.


 Question:
Multilingual HTML using Nisus Writer.

Answer:
     

(Thanks to Joe Kissell)

Q: Can I use Nisus Writer to create multilingual documents for the World Wide Web?

A: Well, sort of, but mostly not. This answer requires some background. As you know, HTML documents are plain text. They do not include font, size, style, or script specifications, but simply embedded text tags to tell a browser how to style the text. Thus, if you put text in a different font (say, a Cyrillic or Hebrew font), the only things that will be encoded in the text file are the actual ASCII values of the characters, which are the same as ASCII values for English/Roman characters. So even though you can use Nisus Writer to enter text in many scripts and languages, for the most part the information that tells a program how to differentiate one language from another is lost in the context of the web.

Even assuming that this limitation can be overcome (which in fact it can under some conditions; see below) there are other problems. First, the person browsing your page MUST have access to the necessary fonts and scripts on his or her computer, otherwise the text will look like gibberish. There is nothing in HTML that can "create," say, a Japanese font for a user who doesn't have one! As you might imagine, this gets even more complicated when people viewing your web site are using PCs or UNIX machines, which have their own standards for multilingual encoding that usually differ from the Mac.

Second, the browser software used to view your page must support multiple scripts. Currently only Netscape Navigator (to my knowledge) has this capability. So even if you have the correct scripts installed on a Mac, you may not be able to view someone else's multilingual page using another browser.

That said, there are still some rays of hope. For one thing, as I mentioned, Netscape does support multilingual encoding methods. The (non-Romanic) languages it supports are Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Central European languages. For each of these languages, one or more standards exist *across platforms* which allow multilingual text to appear correctly, assuming once again that the necessary fonts and scripts are installed. Japanese happens to be the easiest of these languages to support on the web. Simply type in your Japanese using the Japanese Language Kit in Nisus Writer as you normally would, and set Netscape's encoding method to shift-JIS. This requires both a trip to the preferences dialog and a menu command on a submenu of the Options menu.

However, you will notice that users of Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic are (so far) out of luck. There is reason to hope that this will change in the future, but there are no good options yet. And even for users of supported languages, you must make so many assumptions about the configuration of the machines used for browsing your site that it may not be worth the effort.

For people in one of these situations, I recommend the following. First, type in your non-Roman text in Nisus Writer as you normally would. Then use a screen-capture utility (or command-shift-3) to save a picture of your screen as a graphic. Open it with an image editor, change the format to GIF, and make the white area transparent. Be sure the bit depth of the GIF is set as low as possible (1-bit is ideal if you can manage it). Then place this image in your HTML file where the text would otherwise go.

Since the image is just black-and-transparent, it will load very quickly. And it will display your text correctly on any machine or system. It is, of course, more awkward to create and maintain, but the effect can be quite good.Let us hope that in the relatively near future, a better solution, perhaps based on Unicode, becomes readily available. Until then, creativity rules!



 Question:
How do I "Romanize" Asian transliterations?

Answer:
     

A variety of tools are available.

  • You can create a composite character as explained in the Nisus Writer User's Guide: "To use tracking for creating 'composite' characters."
  • You can use any one of a variety of fonts that have these characters in them. You can find some of these fonts at:
    1. Linguist's Software
    2. Knut S. Vikor has also prepared a variety of fonts (while specifically for Arabic) have "loose" macros that can be placed over a lower case and upper case letter. There are also separate macron characters for i, u, a, e and o.
      The fonts come in Times, Helvetica and Palatino-based shapes, Truetype. Freeware of course.
    3. David Prager Branner had prepared "A Guide to Gwoyeu Romatzyh Tonal Spelling of Chinese" at his web site. However, this page seems to have disappeared.
      You can try this page "GR Junction" or even this page "How to read GR".


Question:
I just got the Chinese Language Kit 2.0, and Nisus Writer crashes every time I do Chinese!

Answer:
     Upgrade to Version 6.0!

Question:
Hold on! I just got a new iMac/iBook/G4/PowerBook and my Hebrew/Arabic/Chinese/Japanese/etc disappeared! What's up?

Answer:
     Refer to the installing the language kit page in the tips section.

Question:
I installed my Nisus Writer 6.0.1 and found that when I switch to Traditional Chinese input my system crashes (with a -10 system error message). This problem does not occur when I switch to Simplified Chinese Japanese or Devanagari (Indic).

Answer:
     Our deepest apologies. Here's the solution:

1. Start SimpleText.
2. Choose Traditional Chinese from the Keyboard menu.
3. Quit SimpleText.
4. In Nisus Writer choose Traditional Chinese from the Keyboard menu. Amazing isn't it?

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