* hebrew

[p.padwa]

I have 2 problems
1. I have entered very much info in Hebrew with no problem, but when I produced a book it is written left to right instead of right to left, so it is not legible.
2 . Many of the pictures I uploaded in the media are positioned upside down and I cannot manage to rotate them.

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG.

1. I am no expert on Hebrew, and although FH supports Hebrew characters, it only has limited support for foreign languages.
I guess the problem is with Narrative Reports in your Book and stems from the Sentence Templates?
A possible solution is to redefine the Sentence Templates for each Fact in Tools > Fact Types using right to left notation.
It would be advisable to create a separate Hebrew Fact Set, but there is still the problem of Template Code pronouns, etc.
See Hebrew Language Support (9790) and Wish List Ref 541 Narrative Sentence options for other languages that you can Vote for.

2. The problem of rotated images is a common one with modern digital cameras that record the orientation within the image.
But FH currently ignores that internal orientation.
See Wish List Ref 536 Use Orientation meta-data in Media images that you can Vote for.
In the meantime a workaround is given in how_to:v4:adding_multimedia|> Adding Photographs and Other Multimedia under Photo Orientation.

As a newcomer may I suggest you also study how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers.

[E Wilcock]

My trees with some Hebrew names and places are not yet in fh.
But I have been experimenting a little - both for my own satisfaction and to see what is going on to report Mike and others .

I wanted to leave TMG for a unicode program in order to be able to write in foreign characters for names of places and people. And I had thought that the Hebrew names worked because they look fine on a computer screen and on charts.

I have found it very hard to get consistent results in reports.

I entered my gt gt gt gmother in Hebrew מארלה גולל'ה Marlah Gollin, (the box type character at the right hand end is the M, just to guide you) and her husband in English.

If I create a fh family group sheet and view it on computer screen, the heading is incorrect :

Family of Wolf Gollin and Marlah in Hebrew with the letters of her name printed left to right.

But below it says Husband Wolf Gollin and on the wife line she is correct. מארלה גולל'ה (that little box M is still at the right hand end of the first name)

and further below that, she is incorrect again in the field Name.

I pasted some random Hebrew newspaper text into the Note field of my custom Event Misc for which the sentence is just {Note} and that came out correct. Tho it did not come out correct when the sentence started Person was.
I could see no way Mike of altering the text direction when working with / editing Facts.

However, when I tried saving that report to paste in here to show you the wrong Hebrew, (i.e. twice wrong and once correct) the errors vanished.
Saving the Report alters everything. Hebrew saved wrongly in pdf but correct in webpage.
Looking at the other options, all Hebrew was missing in rtf and all Hebrew correct and in the right direction in text file. So instead of pasting n the mistakes, I get no errors.

Family of Wolf GOLLIN and מארלה גולל'ה
Husband: Wolf GOLLIN ( - )
Wife: מארלה גולל'ה (1780- )
Husband: Wolf GOLLIN
Name: Wolf GOLLIN
Sex: Male
Father: -
Mother: -
Wife: מארלה גולל'ה
Name: מארלה גולל'ה
Sex: Female
Father: -
Mother: -
Birth 1780

The problem with a fh Book is that the choices for saving it are limited and one cant save a book to a format which rescues the Hebrew or brings the Hebrew across.

As, I said, I found it very hard to get consistent results. I dont have a Hebrew keyboard so it has been my habit in the past to type Hebrew onto an online site and then cut and paste it into fh. or anything else. Today I did do some typing with my Windows set to Hebrew and using my own keyboard to type Hebrew letters directly into fh - following an on line guide to the keyboard layout. I am not enough of a computer expert to know whether that might make any difference.

The reason for using Hebrew or Russian characters for individuals is that sometimes the earliest source for a family surname is a document in a foreign language. But I am not wonderfully happy with the idea that if I enter a Hebrew name in fh it is possibly going to appear correct in some contexts and back to front in others.
Maybe Mike and others can see where the logic is?

[tatewise]

I have to admit that this is not a feature I have needed to investigate.
FH started supporting Unicode characters little more than 2 years ago, but as I said, it does NOT support foreign languages.
So the way Hebrew text is presented probably has no logic behind it.
The links I posted show that others have run into problems with trying to use foreign languages.

Instead of copy pasting text, use screen-shots and the 'text' will not get 'reorganised' by whatever tool is displaying it.
Calico Pie have said they want to support foreign languages eventually, so any feedback will help them.

[E Wilcock]

Mike, I have been shown how to use the snapshot tool. This shows an individual summary report (as it appears on the screen, unsaved) with the name wrong (letters running in the wrong direction as noticed by OP) in the title, correct running right to left in the Name field and with the Hebrew Note correct.
I should add a note for anyone looking at this - This individual and the Misc Event was created quickly to explore fh use of Hebrew and is not a true person on any tree.

0001.jpg (49.44 KiB) Viewed 11273 times

[tatewise]

Evelyn &/or original OP should report that problem to Calico Pie.
I get exactly the same effect with a Family Group Sheet.

However, to fully support a foreign language such as Hebrew, the labels and other words in Reports need to be translated.
i.e. Name, Sex, Female, Father, Mother, Birth, age, etc...
In particular for Narrative Reports, the Sentence Templates also need translations for the predefined pronouns in codes such as {individual}, {individual/him/her}, {spouse/her/him}, {his/her} so they use the desired foreign language instead of the English him, his, her, etc.
All that is required is a set of custom dictionary tables, one per language, holding the translation of only each English word used by FH (not the entire English language), and an option to choose the required language.

[arthurk]

All that is required is a set of custom dictionary tables, one per language, holding the translation of only each English word used by FH (not the entire English language), and an option to choose the required language.

I haven't ever been involved in computer translation programming, but I don't think it's quite so easy, since English lacks many of the more complex forms used in other languages.

Hebrew doesn't express his, her etc in the same way as English, but by a suffix on the noun - the easiest way to show this is as fatherhis, fatherher etc.

Even French and German aren't totally straightforward: 'his' varies according to the gender of the following noun - French son, sa; German sein, seine.

But other FH programs handle languages other than English, so I'm sure it's doable - just not necessarily easy.

[E Wilcock]

Mike. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand.
When you ask users to notify Calico Pie of something, how is this done? Do we email tech support?

I personally think there is a difference between my wanting (hoping) to be able to enter proper names in a completely foreign alphabet in order to represent Russian or Japanese names - and a software program designed for users of many nationalities in which the user language and all input and output can be in a foreign language.

I needed to migrate to genealogy software which had unicode only to put in the required "foreign" letters for a proper name.

My use of the fh programme itself is in English.

My understanding was that in TMG, users created a set of sentences for a foreign language - one could select a custom language and add the output sentences of one's choice. Having the possibility of selecting a language, allowed one to vary the sentence output for other purposes too. Yet to show how the original name looked in Hebrew or Russian letters I had to use a work round in TMG, attaching an image of the name as it appeared in the source document.

[tatewise]

Use the how_to:about#problem_reporting|> Problem Reporting advice to notify Calico Pie.
I was only expecting you to notify the inconsistent way Hebrew names appear in Reports, which appears to be a bug, NOT the full foreign language support, which is a new feature already covered by Wish List Ref 541 Narrative Sentence options and Reports for other languages that you can Vote for.

It seems that TMG had the opposite problem. They supported foreign languages, but that was restricted by NOT supporting Unicode, so only some western alphabet 'European' languages would work satisfactorily.

[E Wilcock]

Thanks Mike. Have done.

[E Wilcock]

And had an instant knee jerk reply. No not a bug as FH doesnt support languages read from right to left.
I can understand that but not the sloppiness that allows the Hebrew name to come out correctly in some fields and not in others.

Apparently it has to join the wish list and be voted for.

I moved into fh from TMG for Hebrew and Russian names. Seems I was ill-informed.

[tatewise]

That does not sound like a rational response.
There is not much point in supporting Unicode if foreign names cannot be listed consistently
You were not reporting lack of language support, but complaining about Reports listing the same Name in both directions.
Could you post your submission and their reply.

[E Wilcock]

Mike I appreciate your taking the time to follow this. I have now received a further reply that it will receive consideration.
You would probably have explained it better than I did. In order to spare myself the task of typing more Hebrew, I asked them to read this thread and maybe they did not initially get through to the end examples.

I told you that I had problems getting any consistent results. So overnight I thought carefully about the context in which I might need a Hebrew Name when using fh for academic purposes. Individual testimonies for relatives who perished in the Holocaust are frequently signed only in Hebrew, so this morning I entered the same Hebrew name as the author name in a fh source.

Big sigh of relief that in the author field for a source the Hebrew comes out correctly.

In the Individual Narrative report, the Hebrew name comes out on screen in the correct right to left order in the heading, the name field and the author of the source. The chunk of Hebrew text I pasted into Event Misc also comes out correctly.

The Individual Summary report is also correct.

The family group sheet has it wrong as heading and wrong as wife but correct elsewhere.

Looking back at this thread, I see that the screen image I gave to illustrate the problem was of the Individual summary. Thank goodness you asked me to post a screen shot. So I dont really know what is going on?

One big difference is that today I have not typed in Hebrew (only copied and pasted the name into a Source author field) and I have not had my computer set to Hebrew.

However, to make matters worse, when I reopened the reports in the left margin of fh to snapshot them, the mistakes I reported yesterday are there again. and the name in the source is in the wrong direction. The only difference I can see is that I opened Google Chrome and went on line to this Forum.

I am now going to go off line, reboot the computer,open fh and see if I can re-create those correct reports. Bear with me, as the young people say.

[E Wilcock]

That didnt work - back to the same situation as yesterday. So why when I got up bright and early, opened fh and added that source author to a citation, did it come out with the authors name correct - consistently - and then vanish?

I am not crazy. I wrote my post this morning having seen with my own eyes that it was all correct.

And now it isnt. Is it something to do with fh saving newlky edited data to the hard disc?

[E Wilcock]

Could it be that fh is saving its data to a GEDCOM text file? And that the file settings for that affect the formatting of any report output drawing on that data?
Whereas other genealogy software saves to a relational database where each cell can have its own formatting? So can output the Hebrew names correctly in reports.
Plus, I notice that Roots Magic has two different fields for surname and forename of people as individuals, tho not I think for the author of a book as a Source.
I am posting this not as a major worry about the lack of Hebrew but only only because I dont like not understanding why computers react as they do.

[tatewise]

Yes, the FH database is a Gedcom text file.
But the Hebrew Name is only saved once in that file.
So that does not explain why that solitary Name appears both forwards and backwards in different places of the same Report.

[E Wilcock]

Thanks Mike - I was wrong when I reported that Tech Support had sent another email saying they would look at it - I opened the email replies in the wrong order. I have now written to them asking them to take a look and read through the feed back provided in this thread. I hope they will.

[E Wilcock]

My clipmate software preserved the snipped image of the top part of the fh individual report that came out correct first thing this morning. I am posting it as it is hard evidence for Mike that I didnt dream it.

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[tatewise]

I can see that the Hebrew name is in the same direction as elsewhere, but I would not say that heading came out correct, because the lifedates (1780- ) should be entirely after the name, but are split up and one parenthesis reversed as 1780) ... - ), which is NOT correct.

It is another 'bug' involving Hebrew characters in Reports that I think Calico Pie need to resolve.

[Peter Collier]

I hope this is not hijacking the thread - please move the post if you see fit - but this topic has me wondering something.

If you had a personal or place name normally wrtten in a different script, such as here with Hebrew, which you wanted to use as the primary name but also always to display with a Romanised transcription, would there be an easy way to achieve that without having to fudge the data?

For example, to always display a name as מארלה גולל'ה (Marlah Gollin), or Екатеринбу́рг (Yekaterinburg).

You might want things the other way around of course (e.g. Yekaterinburg (Екатеринбу́рг)), but I imagine the solution would be the same in both cases.

I can imagine it might not be possible to do that and still have names/places list in the correct order (e.g. in indexes on reports).

[tatewise]

To further the discussion you need to be more precise about which Name fields you are using.
e.g. Marlah /מארלה גולל'ה/ Gollin has the Hebrew part as the Surname and the Roman parts as Forename and Suffix.

Interestingly, this format presents the Name in the same way in all parts of all Reports that I have tried, and not some forwards and some backwards.

Sorting on Surname (or Place names) will follow the Unicode internationally agreed sort order for such characters.

[Peter Collier]

I can't really elucidate; to a certain extent I was just thinking out loud. One of the family lines I am following is leading back to Ukraine, where I will be faced with Cyrillic of course, and this thread brought it to mind. I'm not yet at the stage though where I need to think about it in any precise detail. At the moment it's just a "I wonder if I could.." sort of a thing.

[tatewise]

Regarding person Names perhaps you could make the Cyrillic name the Primary Name for both Given and Surname, and put the Roman western name as an Alternate Name. When producing Reports and Diagrams both the Primary Name and Alternate Name are included by default or easily added.

With Place names perhaps the main name can be Cyrillic and the Standardized field the Roman western name.