Problem with Hidden Characters - Hebrew

[shlomit]

Hello,
I opened an old Nisus file (ver 3, OS9) and i got many hidden characters.
I would like to get rid of them but have no idea what they are (beside gap, tabs, end of paragaraph).
As you can see in the attached screenshot there are may little arrows and other marks i don't know where they came from.
Any idea how to do it?
thank you
Shlomit

[Elbrecht]

Don't know -

but maybe just Deactivate "View/Show Invisible"...

HE

[Kino]

Any idea how to do it?

They are directional markers inserted when NW Pro imports a NW Classic document in right-to-left languages. Many of them are just useless but some may be necessary to make the document look right.

To get rid of them.
1. Open the Find panel and set the find mode to PowerFind Pro.
2. Type "[\x{200E}\x{200F}\x{202A}-\x{202E}]+" (without quotes) in the find field and leave the replace field empty.
3. Hit Replace All.

As to your problem related to digits when importing NW Classic Hebrew documents, it seems that NW Pro encloses them with wrong directional markers U+202C (POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) which should be U+202E (RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE) and U+200C (POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING) in this order -- if it is a right thing to solve this kind of problems by inserting directional markers.

[martin]

but maybe just Deactivate "View/Show Invisible"...

Some fonts choose to display these characters at all times, so this may not work.

They are directional markers inserted when NW Pro imports a NW Classic document in right-to-left languages. Many of them are just useless but some may be necessary to make the document look right.

When reading in Classic text we pass the raw data to OSX, indicating the font encoding, and largely use the results as-is. We don't generally second guess OSX's decision to use whatever Unicode directionality markers it deems necessary. Do you think there are any rules we could follow to safely strip out unnecessary directionality characters that OSX adds?

[Kino]

Do you think there are any rules we could follow to safely strip out unnecessary directionality characters that OSX adds?

I know almost nothing about Hebrew but, as far as Arabic and Persian are concerned, I think all directional marks inserted by Apple’s convertor can be removed, except that…

1. the order of two or more consecutive Arabic-Indic digits (U+0660-U+0669, U+06F0-U+06F9) should be reversed. (If the reversion is impossible, they should be enclosed between U+202E and U+202C. But, then, you have to seach for “321” to find what looks “123”).

2. U+200F should be inserted just after “.” or ‘:’ which is put between two Arabic-Indic digits.

3. On Arabic/Persian paragraphs, the Paragraph Writing Direction should be set to Right to Left. (The direction seems to be set to Natural even on paragraphs having Arabic as language attribute so that paragraphs beginning with a character of neutral directionality look very odd.)

According to a Hebrew user, it seems to be necessary to insert U+200F just after “-” which is put between two digits in Hebrew paragraphs.

[Ruchama]

to add more information, it seems that these markers are the cause for the mess in our files as well - (an example of which I sent some weeks ago to nisus support (NOT Nurit's file)). We have discovered lately that when these marks are deleted, the original (nisus 6.5) text can be copied to a new (nisus pro) file without causing the erratic behaviour of the language definition and/or fonts.

we shall be more than happy to check any module that will try to convert the files properly. thanks in advance for any effort.

Ruchama

[shlomit]

Hi all,
To me, all this is big issue.
i will not open 1000+ files I got and perform fine/replace on each one of them.
As I wrote in my other post, http://www.nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3331
Nisus has chosen the apple engine for Hebrew which is a bad one and not developed at all.
I will not continue to use Nisus, as anyway it messes up with all my numbers, and my friend with old computer and a converter that was developed here long tong time ago (Ksharim), will convert all my files to a true rtf and I will open them either in Neo-Office or Word.
I am not accepting that a person that used Nisus for 10 years gets a total damaged and messed up files.

This is not how a software takes care of their users.
sorry.
Shlomit

[shlomit]

Hello,
Just wanted to say the the aplication "Mellel" - http://www.redlers.com/ can import Nisus files perfect, no direction hidden characters,
and everything looks great.

tnaks for the efforts,
I have found my solution.

shlomit