Re: Hebrew in LaTeX

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 03:56:58PM +0200, 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)

ivritex.sf.net is generally more up-to-date. But the differences are not
very big.

> 
> 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.

Though not as a package with a standard name and in a standard location.
Not a big problem. See the CVS version in ivritex.sf.net .

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

Culmus generally works. My deb at home works with the Culmus of Sarge
(0.9.3, sadly).

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir-InM/rOVbCCTlPM0/s5TZ72ZHpeb/A1Y/@public.gmane.org | VIM is
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