Hebrew : Java Glossary

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Hebrew

Hebrew is one of the more difficult languages to handle in Java. The difficulties stem from these facts:

1. It uses a different alphabet. The glyphs are defined in Unicode in the \u0590 range.
   
   I find some of the letter pairs hard to tell apart e.g. Zayin-Vav, Chet-He, Nun-Bet-Kaf, Samech-Mem, Resh-Khaf.
2. It does not have upper and lower case, which makes it simpler.
3. Text is right justified rather than left justified.
4. Text reads right to left, and is pronounced right to left. This the word Shalom which mean peace, hello and goodbye:
   
   The letters are: Mem (M), Vav (O), Lamed (L), Shin (sh).
   In Unicode: \u05DD, \u05D5, \u05DC, \u05E9.
   
5. Numbers read left to right, which are intermixed with alphabetic text.
6. When you key text, you key right to left, but key numbers left to right.
7. You have to be aware of the varying conventions for Swing, AWT, console input, console output, internal Strings, and drawString which you can ignore for left-to-right languages.
8. Mem and Nun each have two forms, one for the middle of words and one for the end.
9. Hebrew has totally different punctuation from English.
10. Because the characters are so intricate, you must render them larger than you would the equivalent English glyphs.
11. Programmer tools and word processors are not built to deal with Hebrew. You have to craft your own tools.

Using Hebrew In Java

• You write your strings in Java literals with the character you pronounce first, first in the string, i.e. in reverse order to the way they will appear on screen. The first character you pronounce is String.charAt( 0 ), and is rendered at the far right on screen. So shalom is encoded with the shin sh-character first even though it will eventually appear right-most on the screen.
• JLabel, JTextField, JTextArea and even drawString detect the presence of Hebrew characters, and even in an English locale, will render that string “backwards”.
• Java is not smart enough to automatically reverse right and left justification in the presence of Hebrew characters.
• When you use drawString it automatically detects the use of Hebrew characters. It paints the left hand end of the string at the x,y co-ordinate given, just like the painting of an English string, but it renders the characters from right to left. Text drawn this way without special consideration will still be left aligned.
• You can explicitly set the orientation like this:

  // explicitly setting right to left text flow
  import java.awt.ComponentOrientation;
  
  //...
  
  myTextField.setComponentOrientation( ComponentOrientation.RIGHT_TO_LEFT );

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