Yiddish on the Mac
Overview

You can type Yiddish documents using standard YIVO orthography in all Mac OS versions; however there appear to be applications that utilize the Unicode UTF-8 standard only in OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" and higher.   In short:

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You can type perfect Yiddish on the Mac without buying any additional software as long as (and only if) you have OS 10.5 or higher.

Notes re: earlier OS versions: Theoretically, Classic Mac OS 9.1 and 9.2 handle Unicode UTF-8, but the author of this web site has never heard anyone report a program that can be used to type a document, either for word processing or email, in Yiddish, with all YIVO standard characters, with correct right-to-left word wrap in OS 9.1 or 9.2 using this Unicode standard.  Nor has a browser been reported that views Unicode web pages correctly in 9/1 or 9.2 so, even though it's supposedly theoretically possible for OS 9.1 and 9.2. Therefore, they are lumped together with earlier operating systems in the above chart until such time as someone reports a working application for Yiddish that actually distinguishes them for practical purposes.

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