Hebrew in LaTeX

Hi everyone,

Recently, I became fed up with Open Office. I have been using it to write
a rather long Hebrew document about Hspell's spelling standard. Right now
it's only at about 22 pages, but already OpenOffice (1 and 2) is driving
me crazy, with random malfunctions that I cannot correct, such as
  1. One day, the numbering of my chapters disappeared and I can't get it back
  2. Suddenly, some of my text got desrever (reversed :)).

This is why I decided to go back to my old faithful friend, LaTeX,
where the "what you get is what you want" ideal is put above the "what you see
is what you get" ("I see crap, so I will get crap" is not exactly comforting).

So I would like to start using LaTeX 2e for doing Hebrew typesetting, and
if I find bugs in that support, I would like to work on fixing them.

But the problem is, that I don't know where to start, and where to contribute
any fixes I might have. So I'm looking for advice.

I saw that in Babel there is already some sort of Hebrew support, and I
saw that there's a separate project http://ivritex.sourceforge.net/.
What's the difference between those? Why weren't the "ivritex" changes
integrated back into the main Babel? Or were they? And how come "our"
version (ivritex) is two years old, while the Babel version is listed as
having a 2005 copyright?
(ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/babel/hebrew.dtx)

My hope is that Hebrew LaTeX will simply work out-of-the-box for people
who are using the standard versions of LaTeX and its babel.

Another thing I'm curious about (before taking the plunge and actually
starting to use and/or fix the existing work) is which fonts are used.
The old Hebrew metafonts were unacceptable a decade ago, and are even
more unacceptable today: their origin and license is unclear (at least
to me), they have no font families (most importantly, no bold versions),
and last but not least - they are damn ugly. I would like to use Culmus
instead. Not as an option, but *instead* of these old fonts. Culmus can be
assumed to be on people's systems already, because it comes with distributions
like Fedora and Debian.

So I'd be grateful for any pointers or suggestions, before I take the
plunge.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Thursday, Dec 15 2005, 14 Kislev 5766
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My password is my dog's name. His name is
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |a#j!4@h, but I change it every month.
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