[XeTeX] Current Hebrew month spelled incorrectly in Polyglossia

Arthur Reutenauer arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org
Mon Apr 30 01:44:52 CEST 2012


	Hello,

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 03:41:31PM +0000, Gareth Hughes wrote:
> It would be good to have the option to choose מרחשון, as that's what I
> would normally write. Could we have a 'marcheshvan' option for
> choosing this more traditional spelling?

  In a long overdue action item, I corrected the misspelling that was
mentioned at the beginning of this thread, and added a ‘marcheshvan’
option to both the Hebrew language option of Polyglossia, and the
hebrewcal package.  The current syntax is a little suboptimal, i.e. if
you use hebrewcal standalone you can say

	\usepackage[marcheshvan]{hebrewcal}

to use the more traditional spelling (both in Hebrew and English), but
with Polyglossia itself you have to say:

	\setmainlanguage[calendar=hebrew,marcheshvan=true]{hebrew}

(i.e., just saying “marcheshvan” won’t work at the moment, you have to
say “marcheshvan=true.”  The other option is needed because the calendar
is Gregorian by default).

  You can check this by setting, for example, \day=17\month=10\year=2012
in a TeX file (that sets the date artificially to 17 October 2012
= 1 Cheshvan / Marcheshvan 5773).

  However, now I’m left with a small dilemma: the name of this month has
been spelt, in English, as “Heshvan” for at least 20 years by Babel, and
that’s what Polyglossia has been using so far too.  But from what I
understand ‘ch’ is traditionally preferred to transliterate the Hebrew
letter het, and that’s what I’ve been using here.  Hence my question:
how should I write the English name of the month in Polyglossia?
Spelling it “marcheshvan” seems more traditional, and that’s what I
would name the option, too; while I’d like to keep “Heshvan” for
compatilibility reasons.  Please advise.

	Arthur


More information about the XeTeX mailing list