Hebrew fonts for Tiger?

July 14, 2005 1:02 PM

I'm using Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), and Microsoft Word 2004. Where the heck can I find some free Hebrew fonts that will show up in a freakin' Word doc?!? I've tried several Unicode fonts (SBL Hebrew and Cardo) - they show up in my Word font menu, but only with English characters! Can I still download either TrueType or PostScript fonts, or did those stop working on Macs during the days of New Coke and Reagonomics?
posted by ericbop to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Unfortunately, you may not have much luck with Office 2004. But OpenOffice supports Hebrew out-of-the-box, and is free. This document will give you the download links and instructions.
posted by Rothko at 1:16 PM on July 14, 2005

Try Mellel for decent word processing in Hebrew. The type is rendered beautifully, with Nikkud and all. In addition to the SBL Hebrew font, I would recommend a better keyboard layout. I think there is one by SIL and there are some at Mellel's site. I have done some work on the SIL one. I could email it to you if you like.

That said, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get at least something out of Word in Hebrew. I've managed to get some type in Hebrew, but it tends to shuffle the letters into the wrong order and such. If you can avoid Word, I would recommend it.
posted by paschke at 8:56 PM on July 14, 2005

Word just sucks. It doesn't use any of Apple's built in frameworks for font rendering, or well, any of their APIs at all, really. Try just TextEdit, which comes free with OS X. It'll work fine, and beautifully.
posted by blasdelf at 9:24 PM on July 15, 2005