On Wed, Jul 11, 2012, Lior Kaplan wrote about "LaTeX and math question": > Hi, > > Could someone look the question here: > http://www.gadial.net/2012/07/11/help_me_latex_people/ > (an open request for help) > > Gadi is also CCed to this mail, so you can answer here. > > Kaplan
The problem his he doesn't seem to have a single question, but rather a whole list of features that simply don't work correctly, and need to be fixed. This doesn't require help on the mailing list, but rather someone who is a combination of someone who cares, and someone who likes to program when things get tough - to actually go and fix these problems. I reminds me how 14 years ago I was happily writing my MSc thesis in English with LaTeX, when suddenly the Technion decided that MSc theses, unlike Ph.D., *must* be written in Hebrew, which is after all the official language of our country (and of the Technion). So I thought to myself - how hard can this be? There was already some Hebrew support to LaTeX, there were some Hebrew fonts, so what could go wrong? But it turns out, that everything that could go wrong - did. Like Gadi said, typesetting a book (or in my case, a thesis) is not the same as priting a letter. Every advanced LaTeX feature I tried to use - Table of contents, bibtex, multi-column text, indexes, everything was screwed up in Hebrew, sometimes badly and sometimes subtly. Even simpler but more esoteric LaTeX features didn't work correctly in Hebrew. To fix these problems I had to go knee-deep into LaTeX's source code (which, as you know, is written in TeX) and actually fix code and write code. Quite a lot of code. Unfortunately, the work I did then now belongs in the trash can of history, because I did it in LaTeX 2.09, but the current version of LaTeX, 2e, has almost no common code with the previous version. But the good news is that supposedly (though I didn't try myself), the Hebrew support we already have in LaTeX 2e is much better than the one I got in LaTeX 2.09 when I started to improve it. So supposedly, fixing the features which are still broken in Hebrew shouldn't be *too* difficult, assuming that you know TeX and don't mind a bit of hard-core TeX programming. Like I said, getting some of these issues fixed will need a person to come along with similar circumstances like mine - someone who loves TeX, loves to program, and is *forced* to use Hebrew LaTeX and can't switch to either English or something like OpenOffice. I'm not sure how much these circumstances happen today :( BTW, If you're curious you can see my thesis (typeset in LaTeX 2.09) here: http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~nyh/thesis.ps.gz And a short report I wrote about typesetting Hebrew with my LaTeX 2.09 improvements, here: http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~nyh/pub/report.ps.gz -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Jul 12 2012, 22 Tammuz 5772 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |If you notice this notice, you'll notice http://nadav.harel.org.il |it's not worth noticing but is noticable. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
