Dear Guy, dear LyX developers, 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. > If you are forced to use pdfTex (or non-XeTeX) you should prefer using > culmus-latex over ivritex. Ivritex has been deprecated for +10 years. Unfortunately, babel-hebrew still defaults to LHE (ivritex)¹, so an unconditional switch will affect existing documents (making them uncompilable² or look different (for good or bad)). ¹ the hebrew.ldf substitute https://sourceforge.net/p/ivritex/culmus-latex/ci/master/tree/hebrew.ldf is an unofficial, unmarked variation with problematic copyright state. ² culmus-latex does not work with "PDF (dvipdfm)" because some font files use the *.pfa instead of *.pfb format. (This can be fixed with `t1binary` from "t1utils".) LyX 2.4 now supports the utf8 and utf8x input encoding options, replacing all Hebrew characters to LICR macros for utf8³ (and the nikuds for utf8x to prevent the "missing combining" option error). ³ I have a patch/package to add support for Hebrew to inputenc with "vanilla" utf8. If there is a chance to get this into babel-hebrew, the forced conversion can be dropped later. > I would suggest shipping LyX with a template file configured with XeTeX > (and sensible and common fonts). Given that there is no out-of-the-box support for Hebrew TeX-fonts in TeXLive, this sounds reasonable. Since 2.3, LyX supports parallel configuration of TeX-fonts and non-TeX-fonts and Hebrew docs are set up to use FreeSerif/FreeSans/FreeMono if Document>Settings>Fonts>"use non-TeX fonts" is clicked. Since today [36a41c2053/lyxgit], "use_non_tex_fonts" is "true" out of the box for the Hebrew documentation and examples. If there is another font family that * supports Hebrew, * is free (as speech), and * is more likely to be installed on the average LyX user's computer (regardless of the used OS), we should change the font setting to use it. > Thats my two cents. Thank you, Günter
