Hebrew Text in Sigil

[Sigil-Heb]

Hey guys, I'm new here and new to Sigil.

I tried editing a text with Hebrew characters, which appear normal in Sigil's preview window. However, in Adobe Digital Editions the encoding is all wrong, and the .epub file is unreadable.

I have seen others talking about other problems with Hebrew texts, but no one said that the encoding is wrong and the file is unreadable.

So, I conclude it's either Adobe Digital Editions, or it is a minor problem to fix which I don't know, being a beginner.

I have included in this message a capture of the screen on Adobe Digital Editions.

Can anyone please help?

[DiapDealer]

You probably need to embed a font within the epub that ADE can use.

Having the font on your machine allows Sigil to display it properly, but that font won't travel with your epub unless you embed it.

[KevinH]

Also please test with known up-to-date epub3 e-readers like Thorium to help isolate the issue. The Thorium reader is available for free on all major platforms and is very spec compliant. ADE e-readers are often old and not based on the latest SDK version.

AFAIK, You would need the very latest ADE version 4 or later to support RTL text properly. And according to ADE, even then it will only work for epub3 not the older epub2 epubs.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Sigil-Heb

I tried editing a text with Hebrew characters, which appear normal in Sigil's preview window. However, in Adobe Digital Editions the encoding is all wrong, and the .epub file is unreadable.

Sigil definitely supports RTL languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.
Here's a link to a simple sample RTL file that I created.

Most likely the text in your book is not encoded as UTF-8.
If you open any .xhtml file in Code View, do you see Hebrew characters?

[DNSB]

For what it may be worth, I opened the sample epub in ADE 4.5.11 and it did not show Hebrew characters while Thorium and Sigil did. I tried embedding the Stam Ashkenaz CLM font which did display the characters in ADE but ltr and without the accents so basically, for me, ADE 4.5.11 is a non-starter for right to left languages.

[Doitsu]

I've just embedded Noto Sans Arabic/Hebrew and the diacritics are shown for both languages.

[KevinH]

But isn't that layout is LTR instead of the desired RTL?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

But isn't that layout is LTR instead of the desired RTL?

No it's rendered correctly. For comparison, see the Google Translate website.

DNSB's statement "I tried embedding the Stam Ashkenaz CLM font which did display the characters in ADE but ltr" is incorrect, because the last screenshot shows the characters in the correct order.
סֵפֶר

The left-most character that looks like a 7 is the last letter of the word sefer. I.e. Resh.

[DNSB]

The characters are rtl but the text should be on the right side of the page as in the Sigil and Thorium images.

Edit: I dug back a couple of years and found a test epub2 file I had created that was in Hebrew. I munged that with the Hebrew and Arabic chapters of my font test file. One thing I noticed was that for epub2, I had specified text-align: right as the default. Sample render from ADE 4.5.11 attached.

[Doitsu]

ADE 4.5 is indeed showing RTL text left-aligned in my epub2 test book. IIRC, ADE 4.5 is using different rendering engines for epub2 and epub3 books. An older epub3 test book is rendered RTL and right-aligned. So is an Arabic epub3 book that I uploaded to MR.

Originally Posted by DNSB

One thing I noticed was that for epub2, I had specified text-align: right as the default.

text-align: right; wasn't in my stylesheet, because I followed the W3C RTL recommendation to use the dir="rtl" attribute, which ADE 4.5 apparently ignores in epub2 books.

Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML

[KevinH]

Yes according to ADE docs I found in web, only epub3 is supported for full RTL language support.

[isaacbh]

OP, as one who struggled with Hebrew in epubs before:

1. Only use epub3, not epub2 (as KevinH mentioned).
2. Every file that contains text for the book should have lang="he" dir="rtl" in its <html> tag.
3. Embed a Hebrew font and enable it with @font-face in the stylesheet.
4. Add page-progression-direction="rtl" to the <spine> tag in content.opf. I have seen so many well-formatted Hebrew epubs that for some reason neglect to do this, resulting in the wrong page flipping direction (assuming the reader program supports it).

[Sigil-Heb]

Thanks, everybody!
So I opened my ebooks on Thorium and the Hebrew letters do appear correctly. The text is also aligned rtl. I did add the attributes "lang='he'" and "dir='rtl'" to my html tag, as was suggested.

In Thorium, it shows the pages side by side on the "paginated" mode in settings, but the pages are on the wrong sides. Meaning, if I have page 1 and page 2, they would appear on screen with page 1 on the left and page 2 on the right. That's the correct order for English, but Hebrew is read from right to left of course, so how do I display the pages in the correct order?

Thank you again.
Sorry for the late reply, I have exams soon.
I am really interested in learning how to edit and paginate with Sigil instead of with InDesign, for example. So your help is much appreciated.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Sigil-Heb

So I opened my ebooks on Thorium and the Hebrew letters do appear correctly. The text is also aligned rtl. I did add the attributes "lang='he'" and "dir='rtl'" to my html tag, as was suggested.

In Thorium, it shows the pages side by side on the "paginated" mode in settings, but the pages are on the wrong sides. Meaning, if I have page 1 and page 2, they would appear on screen with page 1 on the left and page 2 on the right. That's the correct order for English, but Hebrew is read from right to left of course, so how do I display the pages in the correct order?

Thank you again.
Sorry for the late reply, I have exams soon.
I am really interested in learning how to edit and paginate with Sigil instead of with InDesign, for example. So your help is much appreciated.

Did you remember to do this?

Originally Posted by isaacbh

4. Add page-progression-direction="rtl" to the <spine> tag in content.opf. I have seen so many well-formatted Hebrew epubs that for some reason neglect to do this, resulting in the wrong page flipping direction (assuming the reader program supports it).

[Sigil-Heb]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Did you remember to do this?

I didn't notice it. However, this looks really advanced for my level now so please enlighten me. What is and where is content.opf?