August 20, 2006

Greek and Hebrew in Writely

Google's Writely , a collaborative web-based word processer, is getting close to prime time. There are several versions of these type of "Web 2.0" applications popping up. The notion is that you can keep a word processing (or think wysiwyg html creator) on Writely's system and share any given document with any number of users, all who can work on the same document if you choose, even at the same time. What I was interested in looking, was how do they handle Unicode Greek and Hebrew.
It's good and bad.
The great news for Writely is that it seemed to handle pasting and typing of right to left unicode Hebrew text quite well. Even the behavior for lines containing both LTR and RTL (בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים) seemed to work as expected. That's great news.
The bad news is that some Greek was working erratically. It seems to cover the extended Greek unicode range with multiple diacriticals (οὖν), but I couldn't get it for instance to take any accent over an upsilon. ::shrug::
So, perhaps it's getting there, but not quite yet.

P.S. I wrote this blog post in Writely.

1 comment:

Superhua said...

FWIW when I copy / paste unicode Hebrew or Greek into Writely from Accordance, I can view both properly when I'm on the computer that has Accordance.

However, if I move to another computer, either the Greek doesn't display properly (on another Mac), or both are off (on a PC).