IDE / Best known method for writing Hebrew documents with LaTeX

Question

I usually use LyX to prepare lecture notes, course summaries, etc. The reason I use LyX and not LaTex directly is twofold -

1. I usually need to type in real time - summing a lecture. I think for this I'd still need LyX.
2. I write all these documents in Hebrew, and it seems to me that writing Hebrew documents with LaTeX will be a real pain (different direction of text, etc.).

So I'm looking to solve #2 - have you ever used LaTeX for a right-to-left language effectively? What IDEs support this? What do you do when you need to write a document in such a language?

Answer 1

I wouldn't necessarily say you need LyX for quick writing of documents/note-taking (it's more to ease the learning curve), but the following method should work well with either plain LaTeX or LyX I believe.

At present there exist the excellent babel and hebfont packages. The combination of these two packages is likely the best option for typesetting Hebrew text. The former provides support for Hebrew characters/text encoding, RTL rendering, and switching between Hebrew/Latin/other scripts, while the latter provides a variety of fonts for rendering Hebrew characters.

You can turn 'Hebrew mode' on simply with the \sethebrew macro, and off again with the \unsethebrew macro.

Boris Lavva has written a very useful guide to typesetting Hebrew in LaTex 2e, which should get you going. It would probably be fairly straightforward to set up a template for Hebrew documents. Apart from a handful of new macros to learn, you should essentially be able to use Hebrew in LaTeX as you would normal LaTeX.

Note: There is even a hebtech document class for preparing formal technical documents/theses in Hebrew, if you find the need.

Answer 2

I don't write in Hebrew, but I do use Lyx! The wiki has instructions on how to set it up for Hebrew at lyx.org/Windows/Hebrew.

The URL says it's for Windows, but a quick check on my Mac shows that it works on other operating systems as well.

The link also shows how to set up a shortcut to switch back and forth between one language setting and another, so you should be able to do this in your lecture and go smoothly between English and Hebrew (if you need that).

Answer 3

I advise you to use polyglossia package in XeTeX. the bidirectional support in babel is not really powerful but you have bidi package for xelatex that is very powerful. bidi for instance allows you to typeset tabular RTL, you can have almsot any kind of link by usng hyperref package in RTL documents, color works almost works as expected, and bidi supports a lot of extra packages for example, you can use the wonderful wrapfig package in RTL documents by using bidi. Furthur, there are bugs in bidirectional typesetting bugs of babel that are fixed in bidi. As an Example, consider this minimal document:

\documentclass{article}
\makeatletter
\input{rlbabel.def}
\@rltrue
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\fbox{\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}
\begin{itemize}
\item This is a test
\end{itemize}
\end{minipage}}
\end{document}

Gives:

but

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bidi}
\setRTL
\begin{document}
\fbox{\begin{minipage}[t]{0.8\textwidth}
\begin{itemize}
\item This is a test
\end{itemize}
\end{minipage}}
\end{document}

Gives:

Answer 4

As for engine, I recommend XeLaTeX with the bidi and fontspec packages or LuaLaTeX with fontspec. You can also use polyglossia, which works with both XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. From my experience, XeLaTeX’s bidirectional and rendering support is superior to LuaLaTeX, which produces wrong parentheses and brackets and ugly nikkud.

You can see code examples by me here:

• https://xpr.digitalwords.net/ (books and booklets)
• https://ac.digitalwords.net/#theses-2015 (MA thesis)

I use (Neo)Vim for writing bidirectional texts for years now, and I find it very convenient. You can set invrl in order to change the direction of text in the current buffer.

map <C-Space> :set invrl<CR>
imap <C-Space> <Esc>:set invrl<CR>a

Answer 5

The method I use is very effective.

Try this:

\documentclass[hebrew]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
\selectlanguage{hebrew}
טקסט לדוגמא
\end{document}

You can switch to other languages by using \selectlanguage{<language>}.