[texhax] Typesetting in Hebrew

[Uwe Lueck]

[just again trying to get rid of HTML]

Formatting a long ancient or medieval Hebrew text should work with the
Hebrew mode of ArabTeX, using just Knuth's original TeX engine. I made
some alternative macros for use with ArabTeX that simply use the
\beginR and \endR e-TeX primitives for inserting right-to-left material
in left-to-right text (e-TeX functionality is typically included in
today's TeX engines). But it is tedious to combine third-party
packages with ArabTeX, I expect that even standard LaTeX list
constructs do not work in ArabTeX's right-to-left environments.
With XeTeX, there is the bidi package (ctan.org/pkg/bidi) that provides
right-to-left variants of Standard LaTeX list constructs.
 
There also is a collection of TeX support for Hebrew in
 
    http://mirror.ctan.org/language/hebrew
 
Best,
 
    Uwe Lück.

_______________________________________________________________________ 

Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. November 2013 um 05:34 Uhr
Von: "D.Edmons" <dedmons at comcast.net>
An: texhax at tug.org
Betreff: [texhax] Typesetting in Hebrew
Hi,

Though I still use (La)TeX for some simple English documents, I left off
using it several years ago due to it being quite unable to support
Hebrew (without doing backflips, cartwheels, and painful contortions).
Now, with utf8 evolving as the new text standard, I'm hoping things are,
or will be different.

Already I've been able to view some very simple Hebrew using XeTeX and
the TeXworks "editor". However, the result is quite awful. In terms of
display, if I input the following text:
This is a simple English sentence.
and it were displayed as:
English .sentence simple a is This
the average user would be outraged, but this on my first simple test, is
almost exactly what I get: gibberish.

Are there any actual Hebrew users here? I couldn't find an IL or He
user group.

I know there's a plethora of attempts to solve this, but what is the
current state of affairs, and where do I go for the most authoritative
information? XeTeX and TeXworks seems to be a good starting place if
they are able to fix their very broken Hebrew support.

Feed back would be most welcome! (I'm working on two projects: writing
a prayer book with combined English and Hebrew. Formatting the text of
the Tanach/Torah. Accuracy is very much required!)


Thank you and Shalom.

Dale Edmons
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