The First Discovery – Microsoft Word in Office 365/2016 renders Right-to-Left (RTL)…Sort of

History –Mac users have long waited for the ability to enter Right-to-Left languages (hereafter RTL), like Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac into Microsoft Office (particularly Word) for Mac.

Thus far, there have been three possible solutions: use another word processor (Pages, Mellel, LibreOffice, Nisus); run Windows as a virtual machine using a program like Parallels; or buy a Windows computer.

All three solutions work well. But some folks find they still need/want Microsoft Word on a Mac. The other word processors do not have certain features, like Labels and Embedded Indexing, and folks report that they encounter compatibility issues with Office documents. For good or for ill, Microsoft’s Word remains the standard. Alternatively, running Windows as a virtual machine works very well and is seamless (it has been my personal preference since 2011), but is expensive. And to the last option, suggesting to a Mac person that they switch to a Windows machine, is akin to asking a Jedi to venture to the Dark Side of the Force.

Office 365/2016 for Mac summer/fall 2015 - So many users looked forward to the new version (hereafter Office or Word 2016 Mac). Would it finally support RTL? Alas...no joy. Microsoft remained silent on RTL as a feature, and reviewers confirmed it didn’t exist (See an example here: http://kb.parallels.com/uk/4729 ).

The Office 2016 ribbon tells the tale.

In Windows, the LTR and RTL paragraph marks (or ‘pilcrows’ if you need a topic for dinner parties) are here.

Mac – The new Mac ribbon, which has been redesigned to look more like Windows, does not have the LTR and RTL buttons.

No buttons means no RTL. But Wait!!!! It turns out that it IS possible to type RTL in Word and Excel. Sadly, it is not available in PowerPoint. Here is a demo of typing in Word 2016 Mac.

You can also export (copy and paste) a section of RTL text from many programs, including Accordance, Logos or BibleWorks.  (See Rick Bennett’s response to a query on the Accordance forum herẹ:

http://www.accordancebible.com/forums/topic/16881-copy-and-paste-into-word/ )

I imported the following text from Accordance using the SBL Hebrew font.

Things to Know about Word 2016 Mac

1.   Office 2016 Mac requires using OSX 10.10 or higher. In English, that means the Yosemite or El Capitan operating systems.

2.   Office 365 is the monthly subscription and Office 2016 is the boxed copy, which is a one time buy. You will have to choose, which one is for you? For a comparison, read here: http://www.palmettotg.com/blog/2015/09/24/office-2016-vs-office-365-whats-the-difference/ ). If you are a student or teacher, Microsoft offers discounts. Check with your school or sites like: http://www.software4students.co.uk  

3.   I refer below to ‘changing’ or ‘switching’ keyboards and fonts. Some folks are confused about the difference. Suffice it to say that the keyboard determines which keys will type which letters, and the font controls how they will appear in your word processor. On a Mac, the keyboard is usually a little flag in the upper right corner, which Apple calls the Input Menu. If this is new to you, see more here: http://www.tavultesoft.com/kb/index.php?KnowledgeBaseID=80

Issues – So much for the good news. Even though we can now type, and copy & paste RTL in Word 2016 Mac, it’s far from perfect. The fact that there are no LTR/RTL buttons causes a number of issues. I have offered workarounds, but there may be other solutions.  

1.   Beginning a paragraph/sentence with an RTL Hebrew or Arabic Word. If you want to include Hebrew or Arabic in your LTR English paragraph, all is well if you begin with an LTR English word. But what if you want your first word to be Hebrew or Arabic? If you switch to one of these keyboards, your cursor will move to the right margin, and because Mac does not have the LTR/RTL buttons as in Windows, you have no way to adjust this.

Solution -  Begin with an LTR keyboard, and either insert a space or a symbol that will not appear elsewhere in your document, perhaps %. Then change keyboards to RTL. After you have finished your document, clear the odd symbol. If you have several, try a Find %, and Replace All with nothing, including making sure there are no spaces in the Replace All entry. (Find & Replace instructions here: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Find-or-replace-text-or-formatting-in-Word-2016-for-Mac-ac12f262-e3cd-439a-88a0-f5a59875dcea )

This solution works well for Hebrew and Arabic.

2.   Syriac – Unfortunately, the Syriac keyboard does not seem to set RTL as do Hebrew and Arabic. As those of you who work with Syriac know, Apple has never provided a keyboard or fonts for Syriac. The solution used by many, if not all, is to download Meltho fonts from Beth Mardutha, as well as one of their suggested keyboards (instructions here: http://www.bethmardutho.org/index.php/syriac-mac.html).

But for some reason, switching to a Syriac keyboard straight from LTR English results in the same behaviour as the old Mac versions.

Solution – Before you switch to Syriac, first insert a Hebrew (or Arabic), space or symbol that you can later remove, then change to Syriac. This is essentially the same procedure as beginning with an RTL word.

3.   Fonts – As mentioned by Rick Bennett in the Accordance response mentioned above, not all fonts render the vowel points equally well (I have not tested Arabic). Ezra Sil seems to align vowels and accents the best (To download Ezra Sil font, see: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=silhebrunic2 ). Notably, in Word for Windows, vowels and accents render correctly in SBL Hebrew, but not Times New Roman. 

4.   Internet cut and paste RTL does not work – For most sites, including the very useful STEP (Scholarly Tools for Every Person) http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/step, the RTL language will be reversed, as with previous Mac versions of Office.

Solution – The easiest solution is to first copy and paste the text to LibreOffice, make sure it is set to RTL, then copy and paste the text into Word 2016 Mac. Warning: you cannot do the same using Pages and Word 2016.

Conclusions – You are no doubt wondering, ‘Why bother?’ Obviously, Office for Mac still has problems rendering RTL. And let’s face it, my proposed solutions are a kludge – Rube Goldberg would be proud. As is painfully obvious in the Screen Recordings above, it takes a while to manually adjust the keyboard and fonts and to add and clear symbols. Apple has a couple of shortcuts to change keyboards, but there is no way to go directly to a specific keyboard, a bit clumsy when you have several keyboards.

One way to make it less ‘kludge-like’ is to create Macros to change the keyboards, fonts and add symbols. Record the Macros to manipulate fonts (and symbols if you need them) in Word 2016 Mac, then set the Word Macro into a program that can handle Apple system commands, like Keyboard Maestro (Thanks to Professor Steve Walton for this tip!).

You might also be wondering why RTL works at all in Word 2016 Mac. Does this portend a future full-blown implementation of RTL? Or was it an accident? I have no idea and I hope the former.

I recall, however, an unheralded ‘fix’ that suddenly appeared with Word 2013 (Windows only). Word 2010 had a problem with certain large documents (50 pages or more) repaginating differently when you saved them as a PDF. This was not only annoying, but rendered useless any Embedded Indexing. The workaround was to split the document into smaller units (like chapters) and use the RD field feature to run the Index. What is this you ask? Ah ha, wait for a later blog post! Because...

With Word 2013, the problem disappeared, magically and without any announcement by Microsoft. Why? Well I’m not sure, but I noticed that this was the version where Microsoft provided the ability to do some PDF editing in Word, so I suspect that’s how the Word-to-PDF pagination issue was resolved. Thus, it's possible that the improvement in RTL is similarly the result of other changes. 

Clearly, Word 2016 Mac is not for everyone. It remains a mere shadow of its Windows sibling, and it is not evident when, or if, it will ever catch up. Relative to Word 2016 Windows, the Mac version lacks certain features: there are fewer colour schemes; the VBA editor remains anaemic; and the new option to save a PDF to Word is only available in Windows. Two of the most troublesome differences, and ones that were changed from Word 2011, are that you can no longer customise the ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar in Word 2016 Mac. Microsoft promises to return these capabilities soon; the title 'Customize Quick Access Toolbar' is present, but greyed out. As of this post, however, these features are not available, to the irritation of many: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macofficeo365-macoutlook/when-will-we-be-able-to-customize-the-quick-access/b9acac30-adce-44ae-9169-2f274204f6d4?auth=1

Despite its limitations though, Word 2016 Mac does fill the needs of some users, who require RTL. I know three academics happily using it for their work in Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic.

Well that's it for now. Remember, the best tools are the ones you use; choose what works for you!