Re: hebrew font conversion

From: Mark Leisher (mleisher@crl.NMSU.Edu)
Date: Sun May 22 2005 - 12:36:32 CDT

  • Next message: Raymond Mercier: "Re: hebrew font conversion"

    Raymond Mercier wrote:
    > [This is really a question for the Hebrew Computing Forum, but I have
    > tried there and drew a blank.]
    > The problem is that I composed many documents in Word using an ad hoc
    > Hebrew font, and wish to convert to Unicode.
    > When I run a macro that exchanges the old codepoints for the U+Hebrew
    > points, the characters in each word are reversed. I have tried to cure
    > this by writing another macro using StrReverse() . Sometimes this works,
    > but there are problems - especially with tables.
    > Does anyone have experience of this, and or/a solution ?
    > I will have the same problem with Arabic Word docs.
    > Raymond Mercier

    Having had a fair amount of experience with exactly this sort of thing, you
    will basically need to implement something similar to the Unicode bidi
    reordering algorithm to properly reorder your text.

    Someone may have a routine already for Arabic Word since a lot of text exists
    in that format.

    In general, I've found that special cases arise frequently and cause problems
    requiring custom coding for reordering depending on the font and script. If
    you are only dealing with one script, one font, and lots of text, it might be
    cheaper to write a real reordering routine with a toolkit that reads and
    writes Word documents.

    Your current approach is not unreasonable assuming you don't have a huge
    amount of text to reorder. We reordered a lot of documents that way ourselves.

    -- 
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mark Leisher
    Computing Research Lab            Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in
    New Mexico State University       faith but in doubt. It is when we are
    Box 30001, MSC 3CRL               unsure that we are doubly sure.
    Las Cruces, NM  88003               -- Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
    


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