tanyaclement
Member
From a colleague:
I have, for my sins, begun to develop a project of a direct-to-digital edition of the Mishnah . . . Our basic problem right now is text/XML editors. At least for the Mac, even if the editor claims to be fully compliant with Unicode, any time you add tags to the text the word order on the line gets fouled up, which deeply complicates the problem of proof reading and error checking. So my question is,can you recommend a text editor that works with right to left fonts?
Joe Gilbert
AdminBest Answer
I've worked just a tiny bit with Hebrew in HTML and XML. TextMate, my usual editor, doesn't handle a mixed line of left-to-right tags and right-to-left content very well. Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/) seems to have much better RTL support. In theory Oxygen handles bidirectional text, and its validation and tag completion features are very helpful for writing TEI, but I've found it hard to insert tags inside a line (as opposed to <p> tags or similar that surround an entire block of text). Both Espresso and Oxygen helpfully change the text cursor to indicate the direction of the text.
I also would recommend trying a XML editor: in addition to Oxygen (http://www.oxygenxml.com) I'd try Altova's XML Spy (http://www.altova.com/xml-editor/). Both work on Mac and PC and support right-to-left languages and unicode.
XML Spy has a lot more features and I find it easier to work in than Oxygen, so it may work better with RTL languages than Oxygen. They both allow free trials so I'd see which one works better for you.
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