Marrying up Hebrew text with Microsoft Word
Anna and I are getting married next weekend. Sorry I hadn’t mentioned it earlier — it just didn’t come up. Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is that I was trying to get the Hebrew text for the שבע ברכות (seven blessings) into the order of service document, which is produced with plain old English Microsoft Word. And it was a fun odyssey…
First, I had the text I wanted from a book from someone else’s wedding. That helped me recognise the words and characters I wanted to put into Word. But I didn’t know where to get the Hebrew characters from electronically. I needed text, not images of them.
A Google search produced a Wikipedia page on the Hebrew alphabet. All the characters were there individually. Copying individual letters into Word worked perfectly — they appeared just as I’d hoped. But I didn’t really fancy copying and pasting them one at a time for the entire seven blessings — it’s a fairly lengthy text.
Anna suggested copying enough letters into Google to see if the entire Hebrew text was online. Great idea. Although here it starts getting a bit weird, because Hebrew is a right-to-left alphabet and Firefox is a left-to-right browser. Copying a Hebrew letter into the Google search box when your cursor is on the left of the text makes the letter appear on the right of the text. Er, sometimes. Anyway, eventually I got the phrase “שבע ברכות” into the search box, and Google found…
A Hebrew Wikipedia page, with the seven blessings. But the fun wasn’t over yet. Copying each line back into Word produced beautiful letters… but in reverse order. Damn. Obviously repositioning every letter was going to be time-consuming and error-prone. A Google search for “reverse text” found ReverseText.com, which offers a single, simple service: enter your text, click button, and the characters come out in reverse.
So the process was: Copy from Hebrew Wikipedia, paste into ReverseText.com, click the button, copy from ReverseText.com, paste into Word.
Now I have the problem that the Hebrew text in Word runs from the bottom to the top. But this is a minor quibble as I can re-order the lines fairly reliably.
Wasn’t that fun? Join me tomorrow, when I’ll tell you the best way to glue folded A4 pages together to make a little booklet.
