[XeTeX] hebrew support - fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 23 Aug 2007, at 2:36 pm, Dima Sorkin wrote:

> Hi.
>  See below:
> Quoting Jonathan Kew:
>> One option you might consider is to use XeTeX, which directly
>> supports Unicode and can work with whatever Unicode-encoded Hebrew
>> fonts (OpenType, TrueType) you have installed in the SuSE or FC4
>> desktop environment. This example assumes you've got Ezra SIL from
>> <http://scripts.sil.org/EzraSIL_Home>:
>>   ..... \usepackage{bidi} % not in TeX Live 2007, get it from CTAN
>
> List of questions (I'm new to any maintenance of Latex)
>
> 1) I've downloaded and installed Live-TEX. Where do I put the
>    bidi package ? Should I put the 'bidi.dtx' and 'bidi.sty' files
>    at the same path they appear at CTAN and run 'texconfig-sys' ?
>     ( what is the difference between texconfig and texconfig-sys ?)
>

You should be able to put the .sty file into a subdir of texlive/ 
texmf-local/tex/latex or similar; the -local tree is for your  
additions to the standard distribution, and TeX input files generally  
go under /tex/...

The .dtx is source and documentation that may be of interest but  
isn't directly needed at runtime.

> 2) As far as I can see Ezra SIL comes without instructions how to
>    install it on linux/unix (I have SUSE 10.2 at home). Can someone
>    point me to good reference explaining how fonts on *unix work and
>    how Latex and Ghostscript tools interact with them ?
>    - How do I install fonts

There's probably a system-wide location such as /etc/fonts, or you  
can probably also put fonts (such as the Ezra .ttf file) into  
a .fonts directory within your home dir. (The Gnome or KDE desktop  
environment should have a utility for this, I expect, though simply  
copying the file there with a shell should also work.)

>    - suppose XeTeX will use system fonts. But will ghostscript tools
>      (like ps2pdf) see them? I had negative experience with 'culmus'
>     fonts, so I need information how to cause things work.

I don't know about Ghostscript setup, but if you run XeTeX it will  
give you PDF with embedded fonts, so that should be fine.

>
> 3) How do I know which fonts do I have on system and how do I  
> supply them
>    to XeTeX ? This is what I see on my system:
>
> $ fc-list | grep -i heb
> $ xlsfonts | grep -i heb
> heb6x13
> heb8x13
> $

Once you put the Ezra TTF into .fonts or /etc/fonts (if necessary,  
check the fontconfig file fonts.conf to see where the valid locations  
are -- I'm guessing without access to a SuSE system at the moment),  
you should see it in the list from fc-list. It may be necessary to  
run fc-cache first, but most systems seem to do that automatically  
these days.

Then you'd say something like

   \font\ezra = "Ezra SIL:script=hebr"

in a XeTeX document; or

   \setmainfont[Script=Hebrew]{Ezra SIL}

if using XeLaTeX.

JK