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Hi everybody,

I have surfed on the forum, but did not found a solution to my problem.

I would like to mix in the same sentence French, Hebrew and signs of ponctuation.
For exemple :

E1 : וח׳

when I type : E + 1 + space + : + space changing direction + shift to Hebrew trackpad + waw + het + '
my result is :

E1 : ׳וח

even the sign of abreviation, ', it looks like a French sign and not a Hebrew one.

Anybody could help me ? I have tried many things from the forum, but it never works.

Thank you for your help !

I can’t check this directly and have no personal experience with typesetting Hebrew. but I have a conjecture as to what’s happening. I believe that Mellel tries to reverse the text entry direction automatically as you switch from entering Latin to Hebrew characters. It looks as if when you typed the apostrophe, Mellel saw a character that made sense in French as well as in Hebrew, assumed that you wanted the French character instead of its Hebrew twin, and automatically reversed the direction of text entry at that point.

If you’ve enabled both French and Hebrew in the Keyboard panel of your Mac’s System Preferences and check the Show input menu in menu bar checkbox, you can switch languages and keyboards manually using the Input menu that appears on your menu bar. (Or the associated keyboard shortcuts: command-space to switch between two most recently used languages, command-option-space to cycle among all available languages.) That should enable you to defeat Mellel’s assumptions in situations when they aren’t appropriate. Some general suggestions:

For paragraphs that’ll be mostly in Hebrew, use a paragraph style that specifies right-to-left direction, overriding that direction when necessary with the Input menu or its associated keyboard shortcuts.
.
When you need a language and keyboard change that Mellel isn’t giving you automatically, let the Input menu be your first resort.

Save Insert > Space > Direction Breaking Space for special circumstances where nothing else works.

There’s a lot of helpful detail about these matters under Multilingual Support in the “Configuring Mellel” section of the Mellel Guide.

Hi Sara,

First, the direction breaking space here is redundant.
The problem with this layout is that geresh after the het is typed as an apostroph or single quote character and this character has a natural direction, this means that it takes the direction of the text around it. When you put a netural direction character in between chracters that have a strong direction (like Hebrew characters) it will take the direction of the surrounding characters.
You have two possible solutions to this

The first solution would be to use the proper "geresh" Hebrew character. For example: E1: וח׳
This is ideal but the standard Hebrew keyboard cannot produce this character, so you will need to use the emoji & symbols palette to insert that.

The second option is to select the וח׳ sequence and apply a right to left direction using the character palette "options" popover. This is less ideal since the geresh will look like a single quote/apostrophe (because it is)

At any rate, as I mentioned, don't use the direction breaking space as it is not needed here.
You can learn more about using the emoji & symbols palette in this video about basic editing in Mellel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c5f_4XgPp8&t=378s

Thanks, Eyal, for taking over on this one. And apologies to you both for any confusions in my own reply.
Best,
DavidH