> -----Original Message-----
> From: dfdg djfd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: 20 November 2006 17:33
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: open office unicode letters
> 
> Dear Sir ,
{SNIP}
> ect. . But i need to type in hebrew and the letters that i 
> need to go from right to left are 
> ÷øàèåïíôùãâëòéçìêóæñáäðîöúõ,/ 

Dear John,

I might be able to help with this.

One my XP system, which has Hebrew and several other languages enabled, these 
characters in your email are all Latin letters in the Unicode range 0129-0255. 
In other words, they are not Hebrew letters in Unicode, which places Hebrew in 
different locations.

Could it be that the font with which you typed them is an old 8-bit font, 
dating from before Unicode? Such fonts encoded Hebrew characters in positions 
that are now used exclusively for Latin characters in Unicode.

In the old days, that was merely a nuisance, because you had to remember which 
font to install in order to display the characters at all. If you displayed the 
text in the wrong font, those characters would appear as Russian or Greek or, 
as in this case, Latin accented characters.

These days, it is a little more complicated, because the operating system 
typically deduces from the code-number of the character which language (or, at 
least, which type of script) the character belongs to.

In such circumstances, if the code-numbers are in a range now reserved for 
Latin characters, the operating system will want to treat them as Latin 
characters and display them from left to right, regardless of whether the 
shapes of the actual characters in that particular font are those of Hebrew 
letters.

The solution is to convert the document into Unicode format. On XP, this can 
often be done automatically, when the document is opened. You then Save As ... 
Unicode. You can set this option by using Start ... Settings ... Control Panel 
... Regional and Language Options ... Advanced ... and then ticking the boxes 
to turn on the appropriate Code Page Conversion Tables.

If, however, the automatic conversion doesn't work, or produces shuffled Hebrew 
characters in Unicode, then the original text was probably not in a standard 
encoding, i.e. it was probably made by some non-standard software that used an 
idiosyncratic proprietary encoding. In those circumstances, the best option is 
to look for a utility to convert it. Failing that, I'm afraid you might need to 
write a macro to convert each character's code number to the correct Unicode 
equivalent.

Alec McAllister

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to