On 03.12.16 18:49, Scott Kostyshak wrote: > On Sat, Dec 03, 2016 at 04:42:57PM +0100, mn wrote: >> 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. > > It compiles for me. See attached. >
In or on what system? Just installing an official and full (Mac)Texlive 2016 is not enough to produce this. Also zoom into the pdf a bit and see that Hebrew is bitmapped and not vector. >> After I found a latex-culmus-tarball, which I installed into my local >> texmf-tree, now the he-intro does compile. > > Indeed, so it was a missing dependency. LyX does not install > dependencies for you, otherwise to install all dependencies for all > possible uses of LyX the install file would be enormous. > I know. LyX is already quite big to download and install on its own on a mac. But I thought that it would be easier to find out about why a language that is distributed as supported within LyX does not produce any output in that language with a full Texlive-install. >> But then again luatex takes aeons to output anything and is finally >> riddled with extra characters in the output that appear out of nowhere. > > I don't think LuaTeX + Hebrew has ever compiled for me. You used system > fonts? Which fonts? > I tried some combinations of fonts I know or suspect to cover Hebrew codepoints: Myriad, Adbobe Hebrew, Lucida, Ezra-Sil and SBL-Hebrew SBL seems to be the best, followed closely by Ezra. Adobe fonts have too many missing glyphs and more so missing combinations. Those I had to define as default fonts for the document. Luatex then distributes a pattern of capital T and L letters over the top part of the page. >> It seems that xetex is the only choice I have right now? > > XeTeX and pdflatex (although you explained this is not a good option). > Does XeTeX output not look good? > When using Lyx to set the main font for Xetex to SBL-Hebrew I get beautiful output for Hebrew and really terrible kerning for the latin scripts. See attached file. (Also this font has 4 missing glyphs again for the latin part…) So I want/need another font for Roman scripts (haven't tested greek yet) This font-switcheroo must go into the preamble, I am guessing now since I am new to Xetex also. But apparently this is not possible within LyX's gui? BTW: Until now I only had simple and short strings entered myself into an otherwise empty document. Copying this rather complex but still short example into LyX makes it quite slow to handle and beachballing a lot. There seems to be a problem handling this (script or unicode or whatnot). >> Given that I am not missing or overlooking something quite important >> here: Are there any plans to improve on this situation? > > Thank you for this detailed feedback, Mike! Unfortunately we don't have > any LyX developer that I know of that knows much about Hebrew. If you > tell us what LaTeX LyX should produce, then we might be able to improve > things. But we have no idea what LaTeX LyX should produce. And further > since pdflatex works for the Hebrew documents we have (I continually > test this), I was not aware there were problems. Thanks for explaining a > bit why you do not like the current situation. But I have no idea > specifically how to improve things. I do not know how most of the users depending on Lyx (for Hebrew) get started. But I think there would be a fair lot of them using Texlive, some on a Mac. The wiki covers Windows/Miktex and an old Ubuntu version. Installing culmus by hand into the texmf-tree is not only cumbersome but greatly discouraging for the average mac-user, I guess? So wiki pages for a) Hebrew with standard Texlive Installation and b) Hebrew on a Mac would be a starter. Second suggestion: more of this information to be put into the He-Intro.lyx in a lingua franca, i.a. English. I am just starting old Hebrew language and am not good enough to read what's exactly in He-Intro.lyx. greetings mn
hebtest.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
