Chris Heard has put together two screencasts demonstrating how to setup and use your Mac to type in Hebrew. You might want to be sure you have the unicode SBL Hebrew font installed before you watch the videos. The font is available free for download here. Be sure to also download the keyboard driver and PDF manual. You don’t need to use the SBL Hebrew keyboard drivers, but Chris does demonstrate them in the screencast. Thanks, Chris, for a great resource!
If you use a Mac and don’t need to use the SBL Hebrew font, then NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org) is a good alternative to Mellel. Some nice features:
1. It’s free.
2. It’s right-to-left and left-to-right language support is good.
3. It mostly displays Hebrew fonts well (except for the SBL Hebrew font).
4. It supports right-to-left and left-to-right bullets and numbered lists.
5. It is closer in look&feel to Microsoft Office and Pages (Mellel is quite different and takes a bit of getting used to).
Here’s a sample NeoOffice with Hebrew screenshot: http://sites.google.com/site/hebrewsoftware/images/neooffice.jpg
Some tips for setting up NeoOffice for Hebrew (or any RTL language) are on this page:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/keyboards/macrtl.html
– Ze’ev
Thanks for the suggestion, Ze’ev!
One caveat though – if you need to type in cantillation marks then you’re much better off using Mellel on the Mac. Unfortunately (until Apple improves the Hebrew support on the Mac), unless the word processor product has explicit support for Hebrew fonts, standard Mac Hebrew font display is always worse than standard Hebrew font display under Windows. An alternative is to run Windows in VMWare on a Mac (sad when the Mac is so superior in almost every other way!).
Ze’ev