Supporting Hebrew in Apple iWork Suite

The following page summarizes the issues when working with Hebrew, and other RTL (right-to-left) languages, in iWork. It is based on input I got from the Israeli Mac community, specifically, the Mac-it Forums. The goal is to gather all the requirements and send them to the iWork product team.

Your help is required! If you know any other problems, please write a comment or e-mail me.

Thanks,
Zviki

General Issues

• Add an option for changing paragraph, and possibly entire document, direction between RTL and LTR. Either by menu, toolbar, etc.
• When entering Hebrew text, the cursor stays on the left side of the paragraph and does not follow the text. This makes it very difficult to edit the text while writing.
• Editing Hebrew text after entry. Currently, after the text is entered it cannot be partially selected or edited, it can only be replaced.
• Support bullets to the left of the text when working with RTL text.
• Combine Hebrew text with English and symbols - for example, braces are reversed.
• Import/Export Hebrew documents from Microsoft Office - currently, there are many limitations when importing Hebrew documents since the bi-directional features are not supported.
• RTL tables - in all applications tables are only LTR.

Keynote

• Text animation effects ("Builds") don't work with Hebrew fonts - the text disappears.

Pages

• Change the order of columns when working with RTL document.

Numbers

• Support RTL spreadsheets e.g. the entire document will navigate from right to left.