Hebrew Numbering Issue

[Mr.Mountain]

When using numbering as Hebrew letters, whether page numbers, footnotes, or a Numbered List, it is customary (in many circles at least) to switch the order of the letters for certain numbers, such as 270 and 304. The reason is that the standard ordering would spell “bad” and “demon” so we switch the order to avoid such connotations.

However, in LO Writer, they come out as bad and demon.

Here is a demo LO Writer file and also the PDF output of that file, in case it looks different for you.

See page 7 and 8, I put there English text so explain the issue more clearly.

Any suggestions how this can be adjusted?

[ajlittoz]

I’m afraid that for non Hebrew-reading users your sample files without comments would not clarify your point. So I’ll try to reword the problem.

In Hebrew, “standard” letters are also used as numerals. As a consequence a number can also be read as a word. Some numbers are then equivalenced to culturally-rejected words and to avoid these “nasty” words, it is common (-- quotation --in many circles, at least) to permute the numerals.

Out of personal curiosity: this results in a different “number”. How do you disambiguate the number?

Your question is then: when Hebrew numbering is used, is there a software filter between the page or sequence counter and its use in the document, so that the “filter” can apply local cultural rules to get an accepted sequence of characters representing the number?

[Mr.Mountain]

Good point – I edited the files and added English to explain where the issues are and precisely what they are.

How do you disambiguate the number?

The letter shin is 300 and the letter Daled is 4 so the order doesn’t actually matter. Same for Reish and Ayin – whatever the order is, the numerical value is the same.