Yosef wrote:
now I've converted my system (Gentoo Linux) to use unicode, and I can't use hebrew anymore in the preamble. My keyboard of course does not input cp1255, and latex doesn't know what \inputencoding{utf8} (or any other variant).
The actual LaTeX v. 2003/12/01 supports utf8 as encoding. It was announced in
http://www.latex-project.org/ltnews/ltnews15.pdf
You should also have a look at the documentation of the LaTeX-package "inputenc".
Unfortunately the actual LaTeX isn't part of Gentoo stable, because you need teTeX 3.0 for this. But this version is in the unstable tree.
regards Uwe