Right-to-Left in Yiddish in Pages for Mac

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Pages for mac now supports Hebrew, which is written from right to left. However, Pages does not seem to support custom keyboard layouts other than the system's Hebrew layout(s). I am using Shoshke's Yiddish Kayboard Layout for mac (I don't have enought "reputation" to post the link here, but it is actually not that important) on Yosemite, by the way, which allows me to type Yiddish with punctuation extremely effeciently.

When writing in Pages using the system's native Hebrew layout, this is what I get:

However, when writing with my custom Yiddish keyboard (which was most probably created using Ukelele), I get this:

As you can see, the period is on the right, while it should be on the left (at the end of the sentence). This is just an obvious example, but when mixing Yiddish and English in the same sentence the result is even worse.

Unfortunately, Pages' paragraph direction controls do not solve the problem. Pages obviously recognizes the input language and implements the right-to-left correcly only for languages it recognizes from the system's native keyboard layouts (e.g. "Hebrew").

Writing Yiddish with the native Hebrew keyboard is possible, but is much much slower for me. Therefore, I am looking for a way to still use the Yiddish keyboard in Pages, which seems very stable and rebust in comparison to other available word processors (not to mention that it was shipped for free with my new mac).

I see 4 ways to go about it:

Editing the native Hebrew keyboard layout, adapting it to my needs (so far I could only find information about creating new custom keyboard layouts, not about changing the system's existing ones; this solution would actually be the best one – as there is absolutely no advanatge of the Hebrew native keyboard over the Yiddish one).
Somehow making Yosemite believe that my custom Yiddish keyboard is a sort of "Hebrew" (currently it puts it under "Others" when installing it from the Keyboard preference pane, which explains why Pages does not identify it as an RTL language).
Somehow making Pages believe that my Yiddish keyboard is a sort of "Hebrew".
Programming keyboard-shortcuts for Pages that would immitate the custom keyboard's behaviour (so far I was only able to find ways to program keyboard-shortcuts for the app's menu items; maybe there is a third-party application that can program such shortcuts?)

I looked for answers online and tried to open the package contents of the Pages app and was just unable to discover how to achieve any of the four solutions… I would truly appreciate if anyone could help me out (and maybe there is another solution?)

Thank you very much!

Best Answer

Pages 5 does have paragraph direction controls. See

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH15331

Regarding 4, you can make text replacement sequences in system prefs/keyboard/text

Regarding 1 and 2, you might ask in the group devoted to Ukelele

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ukelele-users

In that group they suggested opening the layout with the latest version of Ukelele and setting the Language to Hebrew. I tried that and saved as a bundle and it did the trick: The layout appears under Hebrew instead of Others and periods go in the right place.

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I've noticed that certain applications seem to trap the gestures, even when they're no longer active.

The only time I've been able to 100% narrow down something trapping various shortcut keys was with either Apple Remote Desktop (the built in screen sharing functions), or Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Even though I clicked outside of the app and started using something else, something caused notably my ctrl+←/→ to stop working.

I unfortunately do not remember the specific steps I took to resolve the issue. Whether it was explicitly sending focus into the remote connection window, and then (with the mouse only) explicitly out of the window, and onto another app that is not just the Desktop, might have fixed the problem. Otherwise, I may have just closed the window in frustration.

Either way, this issue is one that you may have to do some personal diagnosing to figure out. Check for any running apps that are notably not native (Java, AIR-based, etc.), or have some other form of deep integration (trapping keyboard events and sending them to another computer is pretty deep), that may be causing this issue.

Merge two keyboard layouts into one

What IPA layout do you use? SIL's website has one for Dvorak. You could edit other keyboard layouts with Ukelele or directly as XML.

You could also try adding something like this to private.xml in KeyRemap4MacBook.

<item>
<name>test</name>
<identifier>private.test</identifier>
<inputmode_not>ROMAN</inputmode_not>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::Q, KeyCode::QUOTE</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::W, KeyCode::COMMA</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::E, KeyCode::DOT</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::R, KeyCode::P</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::T, KeyCode::Y</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::Y, KeyCode::F</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::U, KeyCode::G</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::I, KeyCode::C</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::O, KeyCode::R</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::P, KeyCode::L</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::BRACKET_LEFT, KeyCode::SLASH</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::BRACKET_RIGHT, KeyCode::EQUAL</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::S, KeyCode::O</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::D, KeyCode::E</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::F, KeyCode::U</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::G, KeyCode::I</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::H, KeyCode::D</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::J, KeyCode::H</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::K, KeyCode::T</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::L, KeyCode::N</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::SEMICOLON, KeyCode::S</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::QUOTE, KeyCode::MINUS</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::Z, KeyCode::SEMICOLON</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::X, KeyCode::Q</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::C, KeyCode::J</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::V, KeyCode::K</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::B, KeyCode::X</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::N, KeyCode::B</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::COMMA, KeyCode::W</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::DOT, KeyCode::V</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::SLASH, KeyCode::Z</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::MINUS, KeyCode::BRACKET_LEFT</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::EQUAL, KeyCode::BRACKET_RIGHT</autogen>
</item>

It's based on remap.qwerty2dvorak in the checkbox.xml in the test folder.

If someone else was looking for a way to change the input method when holding a key, see this question.

Best Answer

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Merge two keyboard layouts into one

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