Hebrew text in PowerPoint

[Helen Brown]

A user says that whether he exports as Yehudit or Unicode, the text does not look right in PowerPoint. Can anyone offer advice on displaying Hebrew text from Accordance in this software? Is KeyNote better?

[Mike Thigpen]

A user says that whether he exports as Yehudit or Unicode, the text does not look right in PowerPoint. Can anyone offer advice on displaying Hebrew text from Accordance in this software? Is KeyNote better?

 

PowerPoint will not display Unicode RTL text. Keynote handles the Unicode export very well. For those who want a Unicode font closer to Yehudit than the default Lucida Grande in Keynote, I've found New Peninim MT (included in OS X 10.4x) to be very readable. As for PowerPoint you can use Yehudit, but will need to make sure to export with the Reverse Direction of Hebrew Characters box is checked. Also it's best to copy short segments as it will place the FIRST words of the Hebrew line which fall at the right on the next line not the LAST words which fall on the left.

 

Hope this helps.

Mike

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Impress, the presentation module of the free, open source app NeoOffice, will also handle rtl and Hebrew text. That said, Impress is the weakest of the NeoOffice modules; certain transitions and effects are extremely sluggish, and none of the transitions are precisely speedy. This is related to the decision of OpenOffice.org developers to use XORing for certain graphics functions; XORing provides a speed benefit for Windows (and maybe Linux?) users, but slows things down considerably on a Mac. Because the sluggishness is an OpenOffice.org issue (NeoOffice is a port of the OpenOffice.org code) it's not something that the NeoOffice developers can fix.

 

For modest presentation needs that aren't graphic-intensive, NeoOffice might be an option, but Keynote is undoubtedly a better choice for folks really serious about presentations.

 

It should also be noted that I've not used Impress much, and never with Hebrew, except for a very quick test this morning. (I use the word processing, spreadsheet, and database modules on a regular basis, though.)

[Joe Weaks]

The way I would state the slide setup for Keynote is to make sure you're using manual line breaks.

 

Impress, the presentation module of the free, open source app NeoOffice, will also handle rtl and Hebrew text. That said, Impress is the weakest of the NeoOffice modules; certain transitions and effects are extremely sluggish, and none of the transitions are precisely speedy. This is related to the decision of OpenOffice.org developers to use XORing for certain graphics functions; XORing provides a speed benefit for Windows (and maybe Linux?) users, but slows things down considerably on a Mac. Because the sluggishness is an OpenOffice.org issue (NeoOffice is a port of the OpenOffice.org code) it's not something that the NeoOffice developers can fix.

 

Lorinda,

Did you hear yesterday's news about Sun investing paid time into the Aqua port of OO? (I blogged it.)

I'm curious if they have any potential to reevaluate those graphics functions. I am thinking not, but one can hope.

Joe

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Yeah, I had heard about Sun's involvement. I can't say I'm terribly excited about it, but that's probably because most of what I know about the bad blood between the NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org Mac project is from the NeoOffice side. If I understand correctly, neither of the two Sun developers have much if any experience with Mac coding, and I find it interesting that their announcement made no mention of the current head of the Aqua Mac porting team for OpenOffice.org.

 

That said, it would be wonderful if they were able to tackle some of the Mac-specific issues (including those with Impress) that are a direct result of the OpenOffice.org code and thus beyond the scope of the NeoOffice project.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Just an update to my comments about NeoOffice's presentation module, Impress. Patrick, one of the two developers of NeoOffice, had figured out a way to fix a lot of the drawing-related slowness. The current patch (patch 5 as of the date of this post) for NeoOffice 2.1 mades significant performance improvements. The transitions that were unusable before are now quite usable. There are still some limitations, including no video support. I don't do much with presentations, so I can't provide a comparison of features; it may still not be the best tool for those with heavy duty presentation needs, but it is much improved from a few weeks ago.