Does anybody know: of an Epub converter which does Hebrew

Elihu,

I do not know of an eBook conversion program that will handle Hebrew appropriately. There are too many problems with getting Hebrew to work in reading systems, anyway (for example, ADE does not support it at all). We do some work with Hebrew, but it is limited to the iPad right now.

Shana tovah,
Joshua Tallent
eBook Architects

You could do it the very “old-fashioned” way:

http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s90/robinwhitman/epw_2009/epub-support410x791.jpg

or the recent old-fashioned way — by hand coding — using a text editor.

Liz Castro’s new book about EPUB will help you to figure it out.

If you need a tool (software) to do it, you might contact the developers of the excellent Mellel word processing software (for Mac); their main office is in Tel Aviv:

http://www.redlers.com/supportaboutus.html

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks
(new 2010 edition coming soon)

InDesign CS5 ME can make eBooks in EPUB format in Hebrew: http://kletsel.blogspot.com/2010/07/blog-post.html

Not that I’ve tried, but I figure saving as RTF in Unicode and then converting that to EPUB in Calibre should work.

Elihu,
There is no single software program that will take you all the way from your original MS-Word document to a valid Hebrew ePub file. Especially if this file should work on as many devices and reading software as possible.

We specialize in creating Hebrew ePub HeBooks and we sell this service. Have a look at http://mendele.co.il/?page_id=1041 for our services.

You can DIY but it is a lot of work and requires some background. We use all the tools mentioned in the comments above plus open office plus dream-weaver plus sigil plus notepad++ and a good amount of our own software, scripts, batches, processes and service. And after all that, there is still some manual work of correction.
Good luck and Shana Tova

Thanks Yaron.
I don’t want to put you out of business but I’ve found the answer and I won’t publicise it too much.

Dear Elihu,

ODFToEPub supports Hebrew. After installing the plugin in OpenOffice you can open your MS-Word document and export it as ePub. As others have mentioned, Adobe Digital Editions doesn’t support it, because it doesn’t support the right-to-left writing mode. There is no problem, however, with Stanza, iBooks or the EPUBReader FireFox plugin.

http://www.pincette.biz/odftoepub/

Best regards,

Werner Donné
Pincette bvba

Hi,
I’m trying to convert PDF to EPUB with hebrew letters.
I added ‘direction:rtl;’ to .CSS file and it did change the direction of paragraphs but letters are in the wrong direction..
Any idea how to fix this?
Thanks,
Oren

You cannot, PDF is a print version of the book, you will have to manually re-write the book.

You could try using LangOver which mirror the text but you lose text formatting this way.