How do I convert PC Hebrew to Mac Hebrew?

FAQ for Nisus Writer Classic (versions 6.5 and under)

Moderator: faq-editor

Post Reply
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

How do I convert PC Hebrew to Mac Hebrew?

Post by martin »

You have three options for conversion:</p> <ul> <li>Use a commercial translator. AppleCentres in Israel used to sell one called Esperanto, and there is now a new, better translator called <a HREF="http://www.inter.net.il/~panergy/" target="_blank">Ksharim</a>. I'd imagine that in the US <a HREF="http://www.davka.com" target="_blank">Davka</a> 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.]</li> <li>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.</li> <li>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.</li> </ul>
Post Reply