Re: Hebrew in LaTeX

On Fri, Dec 16, 2005, Ron Artstein wrote about "Re: Hebrew in LaTeX":
>..
> When I started contributing around mid-2003, the person maintaining 
> the IvriTeX distribution was Tzafrir. I would send him occasional 
>..

Thanks for the summary. The picture is beginning to get somewhat clearer,
but I still feel a little dizzy :)

> of the fonts, because any system must have *some* fonts. If we make 
> Culmus support separate from babel, then babel will have to resort 
> to some other fonts as a default -- probably the ugly fonts which 
> have been around since LaTeX 2.09.

I don't agree: already, Babel (at least the version I have with my Fedora
Core 4 installation) assumes that you have the ugly fonts (jerus10, etc.)
on your system, but it does not appear come with them. Babel can be modified
to assume that you have Culmus, but again not come with them.

> The only problem I see with making Culmus the default under babel 
> is one of distribution -- babel should ship with the actual fonts 
> themselves, as it does, for instance, with Greek (and Hebrew, for 
> that matter).

Are you sure that Babel indeed comes with such extra fonts? I don't
see them on my system.

I believe that the best solution is not to include type1 fonts with
Babel, because these fonts have other uses on a system as well (X Windows,
OpenOffice, etc.). Rather, I think that babel (or however it's packaged)
should include ".tfm"s (and the other results of the complex Makefile
you described), and assume that the fonts themselves come from some other
part of the distribution. On a Linux distribution, if you install both
"tetex" (which includes babel) and "fonts-hebrew" (culmus), the pieces
would just fit together, and you'd have the fonts usable by Babel as well.

> In order to support all the characters from Culmus, the Hebrew TeX 
> community has to agree on a standard 8-bit font encoding (which of 
> course would be idiosyncratic to TeX, but there's no way around 
> this). I tried to push such a proposal two years ago but I don't 
> think it was widely accepted.

What's wrong with starting with ISO-8859-8 (which is basically the characters
that most people would need anyway), and continuing with the Windows or
Israeli Institute of Standards encoding (to allow also niqqud)?

In any case, if people use a standard editor (say, vim) to edit the files,
there is not much point in adding characters which won't be visible in vim.
Instead of adding some character for "doublevav" which will look like a
"a with umlaut" (or whatever) on vim, it's better to just have a \doublevav
command to generate this character. Then users won't care which encoding
we chose for this character.

> Anyway, I have distributed in the 
> past a working installation for an older version of Culmus, and I 
> have a private sort-of-working installation for Culmus 0.100. I use 
> it for all my Hebrew writing needs (not much at the moment) and it 
> works fine. And I'm happy to share.

If there's something you can send me, I'd like that. I'm not sure yet how
I'll deal with the dozen different versions that appear to be out there,
though :)

> Another font matter: LaTeX in general is not very good with mixing 
> fonts, and if you want to use more than three families in the same 
> document (serif, sans and monospaced) you have to resort to some 
> non-standard methods. So supporting the full range available from 
> Culmus will introduce some idiosyncrasies. 

I don't see any reason to use more than LaTeX's intended 3 fonts. What I'm
hoping to have is a good Hebrew version of standard LaTeX - not more,
and not less. If anybody wants to do things which aren't natural to do
in LaTeX, he can do them in straight TeX: you can easily put in your
document the TeX commands to switch to some random Culmus font and typeset
a word in it.

> Anyway, I'll be happy to share with you what I have and to go into 
> technical discussions, in private or on the list. 

Thanks.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Friday, Dec 16 2005, 15 Kislev 5766
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Recursive, adj.: See Recursive
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |
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