Software recommendations

[liv]

Can anyone suggest to me:

A text editor / word processor that runs under Linux and handles Hebrew and bidirectional text?

A period and menstrual cycle tracking app where all the data is local only and never transmitted to the cloud?

Text editor:
Must have:

• Copes with Unicode Hebrew, including vowels and other punctuation.
• Allows Hebrew keyboard input rather than having to paste in one letter at a time
• Works on Ubuntu 20
• Does the right thing with mixed Roman and Hebrew text in the same document.
• Displays words in the order I type

Desirable:

• Saves in a file format that other people can open including on Windows and Mac computers
• Free Software (as in freedom, don't mind paying money for it)
• Copes with different sized text within the same document
• If not a full GUI, at least the ability to navigate through the document with a mouse and select text to delete, edit or move. I'm used to WYSIWYG but I can live without if the other features are present

The problem I have right now is that most things I've tried apart from LibreOffice can't cope with Hebrew text at all, or if they can just about manage plain letters, can't deal with punctuation. But LibreOffice has some really bizarre bugs: no matter how often I manually set the language to Hebrew, every time I actually type in Hebrew it reverts to Hindi, and uses a font that, well, I'm amazed it works for Hebrew at all since it's meant for Devanagari, but it doesn't work for pointed Hebrew very well.

And more seriously, it just randomly changes the text direction mid typing, even for a block that is entirely in Hebrew. That means I have almost no control over the word order, if I try to type a sentence or a list, there's a good chance that it will randomly move the fifth word to the beginning of the sentence, or start a new line above instead of below the last item, and even copying and pasting text into the right place doesn't work. Also, whenever I save the file and reopen it, it moves a bunch of words around. Not just in position on the screen, which is annoying but I can live with it, it changes their order within sentences. Even copy-pasting from a high quality Unicode source doesn't work reliably.

My current workaround is a) reformat everything and if necessary move words back to the right place every time I open the document and whenever the weird direction bug shows up b) keep saving multiple versions as PDF, which at least doesn't mess up the formatting and word order, even if it's essentially not editable. This is really frustrating!

Period tracker
Must have:

• Runs on Android or Linux
• Has the option to store all data offline and never ever put it on anybody else's computer. It's not like my period data is super top secret, just I feel uncomfortable with advertisers getting hold of it. So I don't need high security, just local storage.

Desirable:

• Not overly cutesie wootsy
• Gender inclusive if possible; I am in fact a cis woman so I'm not going to be hurt personally by being assumed to be one, but I would rather support an option that doesn't harm non-women who have periods.
• Doesn't insist on tracking, or otherwise nag me about, my weight.
• Allows me to ignore fertility-related inferences. I just want to track my periods as health data for my own use, I'm not trying to get pregnant, and in as far as I'm TTA cycle tracking isn't the major part of my strategy. I want something that reminds me I'm close to ovulation, without assuming, yay, now is a great time to have sex and make babies! nor, danger danger you might get pregnant!

Current solution: just a spreadsheet. This is probably good enough but if anybody has knowledge of something else more convenient that would be great. I'm happy with any business model except selling medical data, and specifically don't mind paying money for this.

I don't mind social bonding by chatting generally about related software, but I am mainly looking for actual suggestions that meet my requirements. Please don't bother telling me I should use a different operating system though. I'm not really interested in opinions about Ubuntu, Linux or Android.

Comments

[liv]

Scribus, thank you for the rec. What I'm doing may in fact be closer to DTP; eventually I want to put all my documents together in ebook format.

I did spot the irony of 'easy – only 14 steps' but honestly those guides look pretty clear and if following those steps actually works it will be more than worth it to never have to tear my hair out over words moving around within sentences.

[theandrewhickey]

Scribus isn't any good for ebooks other than PDF -- it's designed for laying out physical paper pages, and is excellent for, for example, creating zines, but it would be awful for creating ebooks. To create an ebook you want to use a word processor and export to either HTML or RTF (if you do go with LyX, I'd install the latex2html package and use that), and then if you're going to give the book away for free or just read it yourself, use calibre ( https://calibre-ebook.com/download ) to convert it into a serviceable epub/mobi file. If you're planning to sell the ebooks, then Draft2Digital.com will, as well as putting the ebooks on all the non-Amazon stores, format the ebook files for you and do a better job than you're likely to be able to do yourself.

[liv]

Aha, thank you. I feel that the distinction between WP and DTP has been blurry for a couple of decades now, but that gives me a clear idea of the use cases for the different software. And yeah, I'm thinking Calibre will need to be in my work flow at some point. At the moment my priority is to get the content written, and after that I want to get it proofread by native speakers of Hebrew (who at the moment can't reliably open my files, *sigh*), and tested by the intended users. Turning the work into publishable format is quite a long way down the line, and LibreOffice is really painful for turning out even basic drafts.