Microsoft Word for Yiddish
Yiddish Unicode Word Processing in Office 2000 and up

The easiest way to get state of the art Yiddish word processing, assuming you have Windows 2000/NT/XP/Vista/Windows 7 is to simply use Microsoft Word, which comes with most Windows systems. The versions of Word which work for Yiddish in Unicode are the versions which come with Microsoft Office 2000 and up. You can install these Word versions on earlier Windows systems, it might work for Yiddish; but most Win 95/98/ME systems lack the memory and processing power to handle it. As of mid-2006, there was no version of Microsoft Word which worked for Yiddish on the Mac. I don't know anyone who has tried it since then. If anyone has updated information about Yiddish in Word on the Mac, please let me know (email link at end of this page). To read more about Yiddish word processing in general, click here. To use Microsoft Word for Yiddish, read on:

Micosoft Word (Office Professional) in Windows 2000 and up:

1. I suggest adding three buttons to your Word toolbar, or creating a Yiddish toolbar in Word:

• In Word, go to Tools, Customize.

• If you wish to make a Yiddish toolbar, go to Toolbars, New and type in a name; e.g., Yiddish, and hit OK. (You can type the toolbar name in Yiddish if you wish, by toggling to "Hebrew" per the instructions on the previous pages, referenced above.)

• Click on the Commands tab (still within Tools, Customize).

• Click on Format.

• Find each of the following commands in the format list, and drag them, one at a time, to your toolbar.
  • Keyboard Language
  • Left to Right (paragraph direction) (LTR)
  • Right to Left (paragraph direction) (RTF)
• Hit Close on the Customize window.

• Go to View, Toolbars, and be sure that the Toolbar where you dragged the 3 command to is checked.

• You can drag the new toolbar to reside on an empty space in an existing toolbar, if you like.

2. Now, you're set. When you want to type in Yiddish, click on the Keyboard Language icon on your toolbar to get "HE" and also click on the RTF icon.

3. To insert a few English (for example) words into a Yiddish paragraph, click on Keyboard Language to get "EN."  Then, return to "HE" to return to Yiddish.

4. To insert, say, an entire English paragraph (or more) into a Yiddish document, hit Enter to create a new paragraph. Then, click the Keyboard Language for "EN" and also hit LTR.

5. In order to avoid confusion when searching for character strings which include quotation marks, go to Tools, Autocorrect, and disable all options including Smart Quotes. (They aren't smart enough to handle Yiddish quotation marks, apparently.)

6. It's recommended that you save and continue working with any Yiddish texts written in Word as htm/html files (e.g., filename.htm) and NOT as Word files (filename.doc). This makes it easier for the yidish-shraybmashinke to convert your documents into other formats, should you decide to use it. In any case, while Yiddish *.doc files can be problematic, there's nothing in Word that you can't do with an *.htm file. This includes printing, saving to pdf format, etc.

Any issues? Please comment on the UYIP discussion group.

• Back to A Users' Guide to Yiddish on the Computer for an overview.

• Back to Summary of Software for Yiddish Computing