On 2019-04-29, mn wrote: > On 29.04.19 14:24, Guenter Milde wrote: >> On 2019-04-28, Guy Rutenberg wrote:
>>> I think for 99% of the users writing in Hebrew, XeTeX is the (only) >>> reasonable choice for writing in Hebrew. There are many broken things >>> pdfTeX when it comes to Hebrew (and RTL languages), and fonts are only one >>> of them (another example is hyperref). >> I agree with this for documents with Hebrew as main language where Xe- or >> LuaTeX make things a lot easier. >> The situation is somewhat different for the use case of documents in >> other languages containing just some quote or word in Hebrew. Here, many >> users may want to stick to 8-bit LaTeX with TeX fonts because of >> stability, compilation speed, special requirements or setup. So LyX >> should support this as good as possible. > To me it appears as if the situation is *even worse* in the usage > scenario "just some Hebrew", or better "mixed scripts". > Think linguists, hebraists, theologians etc. These will often not use a > single Hebrew word in an otherwise Latin script sentence, but fragment > of sentences, paragraphs etc. Yes, for scholars making more than occasional use of Hebrew, the situation is similar to the native speakers: Both will have to switch between scripts and writing directions quite often. Also, the nikud and cantillation signs are hard/impossible to get right with 8-bit TeX fonts. > If you care one bit about typography, you usually want to control it. > And both solutions mentioned mix imo quite awfully with what I want or > have to use. The proposed solutions for 8-bit TeX are about getting a default setup working out of the box. It does not prevent/hinder font customization. > For all the reasons you listed I hated switching to XeTeX, but it > appeared as the only sensible option. I ran into problems with pdfLaTeX > that were very difficult to circumvent or solve, sometimes impossible to > surmount. Problems that were either easy to solve with XeTeX or never > there in the first place. > I asked around in on this list, in other forums, inquired theologians > and Israelis about this. Not a single soul recommended to stick with > pdfLaTeX, all said XeTeX is the way to go by now. This explains somewhat the stalled development of the Hebrew support for 8-bit LaTeX. > If upstream doesn't have a nice solution for this, then I really > applaud every effort LyX attempts to make this better. It is really > awful right now. There are some simple steps that could overcome the main incompatibilities with other languages in 8-bit LaTeX which I would like to see fixed upstream (getting an updated culmus-latex into CTAN/TeXLive, fixing hebrew.ldf and he8enc.def, support for "vanilla" utf8 with inputenc). > But the shortage of dev-power suggests that to me that perfecting XeTeX > support would be a priority. We are working on this (see the other postings regarding Hebrew). Thank you for the feedback, Günter
