Writing Hebrew in OpenOffice under Linux by slaveofone
This quick tutorial is provided to help those who, like myself, are or have been interested in utilizing Hebrew in OpenOffice under the KDE desktop.
I’m going to assume, first of all, that you’ve downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice. Apparently, versions previous to 2.0.0 have been somewhat buggy trying to render vowel points/diacritics or nikud. Since I’m using Fedora Core 5, I simply used my package manager to update everything and install any extra language components. It doesn’t hurt to update KDE to the lastest release either.
Next, download the SBL Hebrew font from the Society of Biblical Literature website. This is a Unicode Hebrew font (which means you can copy and paste the Hebrew into other software applications and it will be recognized and displayed correctly). Trust me when I say this Hebrew font looks immaculate.
Once you have the font, install it in your KDE Control Center (kcontrol in the terminal) under System Administration - Font Installer
While you’re in Control Center, you need to enable a Hebrew keyboard (so that when you type, it will display Hebrew characters instead of English ones).
click on Regional and Accessibility - Keyboard Layout - double click on Israel (il) to add it
Note: To enable use of vowel points/diacritics or nikud, go to layout variant
and select lyx
. Now you can write vowels.
Hit apply.
KDE automatically generated a keystroke shortcut for you to switch easily between English and Hebrew keyboards (CTL+ALT+K). To check or change your keystroke shortcut, go to Keyboard Shortcuts. I changed mine to CTL+ALT+Up Arrow.
Lastly, set up OpenOffice.
Go to Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages - and check to see that Complex Text Language (CTL) is enabled. Then set SBL Hebrew as your default font in Format - Character - CTL font.
Hopefully, you already have two buttons in your menu bar which change the direction of writing from a left-to-right
orientation to a right-to-left
one. If not, the default shortcuts are CTL+SHIFT+A (left-to-right) and CTL+SHIFT+D (right-to-left).
Diacritical marks are:
- SHIFT+E = qamets/quamets-chatuf
- SHIFT+R = dagesh/shureq
- SHIFT+U = cholem/cholem-vav
- SHIFT+P = patach
- SHIFT+A = sheva
- SHIFT+S = dagesh/shureq
- SHIFT+G = cholem/cholem-vav
- SHIFT+H = the mark for shin
- SHIFT+J = chireq
- SHIFT+X = segol
- SHIFT+C = qibbuts
- SHIFT+V = chatef-segol
- SHIFT+B = chatef-patach
- SHIFT+N = chatef-qamets
- SHIFT+M = tsere
Check out the keyboard chart map below and get your Hebrew on.
