Declare missing unicode characters in a separate file

Question

This question is concerned about writing a non-english document in LaTeX.

I compile my Hebrew document with pdfLaTeX. I know, XeLaTex or LuaLaTeX with the polyglossia package are Unicode engines, and are the recommended engines for non-Latin scripts. But I decided to stick to pdfLaTeX for its other useful features.

As I learned here, one can declare the Hebrew glyphs in the preamble, thus defining behavior for Unicode characters:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Specifies which font encoding LATEX should
                         % use, (8-bit encoding (T1))
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % Translate various standard and other
                            % input encodings into a ‘LaTeX internal language‘
\usepackage{culmus} % Hebrew fonts from the Culmus project
\usepackage[main=english, hebrew]{babel} % Multilingual support,
                                         % typographical (and other) rules
\pdfmapfile{=culmus.map} % pdflatex now reads the file culmus.map,
                        %  which tells pdflatex how to get the font into the output file

%% Declarations %%
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D0}{\hebalef}
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D1}{\hebbet}
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D2}{\hebgimel}
% and so on, up to 
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05EA}{\hebtav}
%% Document %%
\begin{document}
כיתוב בעברית
\end{document}

Now comes my question: I want to write down these 27 declarations in a separate file (probably a .sty or a .def file?) so as to make my preamble cleaner.

What is the correct way to do that?

What command should I pass to my latexmkrc file so that pdfLaTeX searches there for the declarations list?

Does the inputenx package can do this for me? If yes, then what argument should I pass to \usepackage[...]{inputenx}?

Any suggestion or help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think that a possible solution is to write the declarations in an external .sty file, and call it from the preamble.

% file hebrewDeclarations.sty
%% Declarations %%
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D0}{\hebalef}
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D1}{\hebbet}
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D2}{\hebgimel}
% and so on, up to 
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05EA}{\hebtav}

Whereas the tex file is:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Specifies which font encoding LATEX should
                         % use, (8-bit encoding (T1))
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % Translate various standard and other
                            % input encodings into a ‘LaTeX internal language‘
\usepackage[main=english, hebrew]{babel} % Multilingual support,
                                         % typographical (and other) rules
\usepackage{hebrewDeclarations} % Reference to the external sty file

%% Document %%
\begin{document}
כיתוב בעברית
\end{document}