Re: Hebrew in LaTeX

Hi Nadav,

 From your description, it doesn't sound like the bugs you encountered 
are easily reproducable, but could you send me the document or the 
portions of the document that gave you problems? Though it's doubtful 
that fixes will get into Hebrew 2.0, maybe we can get fixes into the 
following Hebrew version, or even into the main OOo source.

Thanks,
Alan

Nadav Har'El wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>

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