Interlinear with Hebrew, transliteration, and English

Question

I am new to LaTeX and am trying to create a long document with three interlinear lines:

• top row - Hebrew (note: this is a right-to-left language)
• middle row - transliteration of the Hebrew
• bottom row - English translation.

Here is what the output would approximately look like:

    שלום   קוראים  לי    דוד
    david   li  korim   shalom
    David   my name is   Hello

I've read that ExPeX and/or polyglossia could be helpful, but I'm at a loss for how to even get started with all this. I would appreciate example code of:

1. how to properly code the interlinear and make it work with Hebrew,
2. how to make Hebrew text show up in the output (I currently can't even get Hebrew text to show up in the PDF after QuickBuild).
3. how to use different Hebrew fonts.

Answer 1

Based on an example from the ExPex documentation I came up with the following code using XeLaTeX which produces more or less what you asked for. If the main language of your document is English, you might want to change \setmainlanguage{hebrew} to \setmainlanguage{english} and \setotherlanguage{english} to \setotherlanguage{hebrew}. In this case the \textenglish command is not needed but you should enclose the Hebrew words by a \texthebrew command.

If you want to use different Hebrew fonts, you have to change the \newfontfamily commands accordingly. I used the Hebrew fonts I have installed on my computer.

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{expex}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage{hebrew}
\setotherlanguage{english}

\newfontfamily\hebrewfont[Script=Hebrew]{David CLM}
\newfontfamily\hebrewfonttt[Script=Hebrew]{Miriam Mono CLM}
\newfontfamily\hebrewfontsf[Script=Hebrew]{Simple CLM}

\begin{document}
\begingl
  \gla שלום קוראים לי דוד //
  \glb \textenglish{shalom} \textenglish{korim}  \textenglish{li} \textenglish{david}//
  \glc \textenglish{Hello}  \textenglish{name is}  \textenglish{my} \textenglish{David}//
\endgl

\end{document}

This code produces the following output:

Please note that this code has to be compiled with XeLaTex (and not with pdfLaTeX).