Re: Hebrew in LaTeX

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005, Nadav Har'El wrote about "Hebrew in LaTeX":
>...
> 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
>..
>   2. Suddenly, some of my text got desrever (reversed :)).

For more than two months, I've been bugged by this problem in OpenOffice 2.
Random words in my documents (basically any Hebrew document I opened) got
reversed, making OpenOffice totally unusable for me. Surprisingly few other
people noticed bug, which seemed to affect only some installations, and
not others (with my bad luck, it affected mine).

Today, Alan Yaniger and Ido Kaner came up on linux-il with a surprising
explanation for this bug, and a trivial workaround to fix it, which I
thought might be helpful to repeat here, in case other people are facing
the same problem.

It turns out that all you have to do is to uncheck (remove) the option
Language Settings->Complex Text Layout->Sequence Checking->Use sequence Checking
in the options menu. Then restart openoffice, and voila, no more random
word reversal!

I wonder what this "Use Sequence Checking" is supposed to do, or why it is
broken, but at least everything seems to work much better without it.

> 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).

Unfortunately, this part of my mail has a less optimistic ending. I realised
that it will take me days upon days to understand what's going on in the N
different versions of Hebrew Latex floating around, and M different versions
of Hebrew font support, and their N*M combinations, and unfortunately
I simply did not find the time to do this. So I have not returned to LaTeX,
despite all of its reliability that I miss so much :(

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Wednesday, Feb 8 2006, 10 Shevat 5766
nyh-TS7m/[email protected]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |(On the back of a VW Beetle) Don't honk,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |I'm peddling as fast as I can.
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