So I wanted to get started with ancient Hebrew texts. Using Texlive-full, LyX and my usual setup I ran immediately into problems, quite severe. Searched tutorials for doing such a thing and nothing of this kind worked. Not even he-intro.lyx does compile. That's why this question goes to devel. As a feedback and a collection of questions.
AFAIK Liberation is one, of the far to few choices in LyX for pdflatex, font that should contain modern Hebrew glyphs. Yet still the log file shows errors pointing to a missing jerus10. (Searching the archives I found a discussion on lyx-devel from 2013 from which I learned that even ps2pdf should work?) One thing not clear to me is: when and where are those alternatives for text-fonts or differing writing scripts chosen, how do I control that from within LyX? As is, I would say to others asking me: LyX does not support Hebrew out of the box, the way to achieve any Hebrew output is arduous, and beginners should therefore avoid LyX for something like this. Not ideal. Since I am on a Mac there is also no guide for that on the wiki. After I found a latex-culmus-tarball, which I installed into my local texmf-tree, now the he-intro does compile. But my own input, which shall be vocalized, still produces nothing but headaches. My goal is to use pdflatex, ideally. But definetely unicode input with SBL-keyboard and either ezra-sil or sbl-hebrew as fonts for Hebrew mixed with a latin font of my choosing for default roman. This since I read that Culmus seems to have problems with nikud and cantillation. That I would have to install Ezra and SBL-Hebrew as latex-fonts represents another problem I would gladly avoid. But then again luatex takes aeons to output anything and is finally riddled with extra characters in the output that appear out of nowhere. It seems that xetex is the only choice I have right now? Given that I am not missing or overlooking something quite important here: Are there any plans to improve on this situation? greetings Mike
