How to print some Hebrew?

August 10, 2023 1:44 PM

I need to print some Hebrew characters using a Mac.

I have to print a few Hebrew characters using a mac and an HP laser printer. This is a one time situation. Is there a website that will enable this? Or can I make adjustments to the Mac?

posted by elf27 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You should just be able to hit print. What's the problem you're encountering?
posted by bowbeacon at 1:52 PM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can write in Hebrew in something like pages, using a Hebrew font, and then print it out…do you have the letters you want to print on a website or something? You should be able to copy and paste them into Pages (or word, or whatever).

Can you give more details?
posted by leahwrenn at 1:59 PM on August 10, 2023

You can copy and paste unicode characters from a hebrew alphabet reference into TextEdit, adjust the font size, and print.

You could also use the Mac Character Viewer to search for any character by name.
posted by Phssthpok at 2:00 PM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Any printer and any Mac app can do this. You can copy and paste Hebrew from a document or web page into a Mac app, like any other text, and you can enable an on-screen Hebrew keyboard from the keyboard settings if you want to type text in Hebrew.
posted by zippy at 2:09 PM on August 10, 2023

In system preferences you can add Hebrew as a language to your keyboard. You can also chose to use a virtual keyboard if you don’t know where the Hebrew characters are on QWERTY. This allows you to type in Hebrew in a word processor and to print.
posted by slimeline at 2:14 PM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Unless you have a very old Mac, there should be no problem copying and pasting into a document.

You can type Hebrew, but if you're new to this it can be difficult and error-prone— e.g. you have to recognize the letters, and know what keyboard combos will produce letters like אקט.

Sometimes apps don't fully support Hebrew (e.g. Adobe Illustrator doesn't). Carefully compare the printout to your original to make sure your app hasn't (say) reversed all the text.
posted by zompist at 3:34 PM on August 10, 2023

To reiterate, if something is already displaying correctly on the screen on your Mac, you should be able to print it; barring font complications.

You can try installing Hebrew language support if you're having problems and/or want to type in Hebrew. You do that in the "Language and Region" System Settings ('preferences') panel.

As a hack, if there's something on your screen you want to print and it isn't working for whatever reason, CMD+SHIFT+4 will let you capture a region of the screen as an image (at screen resolution, using a rectangular bounding box) which you can then print. Screenshots are saved to the Desktop folder by default (named by timestamp) as .PNGs, which Preview will handle.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:29 PM on August 10, 2023 [1 favorite]