Getting Hyperref to Work with Hebrew (in XeTeX)

The hyperref package is notorious for causing problems with RTL text, which unfortunately includes Hebrew. In this post, I present some preliminary workarounds that enable the user to use the hyperref package with Hebrew and possibly other RTL languages. The solution requires XeTeX, which is available in TeXLive. I had no success yet porting the workaround to pdfTeX, which is more popular.

The problem is that because TeX doesn’t store information regarding the direction of text inside the DVI, RTL text is actually stored in reverse. When a link is inserted in such text, the command to start the link ends up after the command to end the link, which is problematic. When trying to compile such a document with pdfTeX, it throws errors like:

! pdfTeX error (ext4): pdf_link_stack empty, pdfendlink used without pdfstart

On the other hand, XeTeX behaves a little nicer and compiles the document, but the wrong parts of the text are marked as links.

My workaround basically changes the order of the start and end link commands. Thus, in RTL text the commands get reversed and actually end up in the correct order. The workaround doesn’t support links spanning multiple lines or color links (although link borders are supported). Further work needs to be done in order to support links in the table of contents. I could get it to work only in LTR mode (which isn’t good). You should insert the following code into your preamble in order to enable the workaround.

makeatletter
defhyper@link#1#2#3{%
  if@rl
    setLR
      begingroup
      hyper@linkend
        #3
      hyper@linkstart{#1}{#2}
    setRL
  else
    hyper@linkstart{#1}{#2}
        #3
    hyper@linkend
  fi
}
makeatother

I’ll also note that in order to generate correct PDF bookmarks (not in gibberish), you should set unicode=false in the hyperref options.

You can find a working example below (and the corresponding PDF output here).

documentclass{article}
usepackage{fontspec}
usepackage{xunicode}
usepackage{bidi}

usepackage[unicode=false,
 bookmarks=true,bookmarksnumbered=false,bookmarksopen=false,
 breaklinks=false,pdfborder={0 0 1},backref=false,colorlinks=false]
 {hyperref}

makeatletter
defhyper@link#1#2#3{%
  if@rl
    setLR
      begingroup
      hyper@linkend
        #3
      hyper@linkstart{#1}{#2}
    setRL
  else
    hyper@linkstart{#1}{#2}
        #3
    hyper@linkend
  fi
}
makeatother
setromanfont{Times New Roman}

begin{document}
setRL
title{בדיקה}
author{גיא רוטנברג}
date{}
maketitle
pagebreak{}

section{סעיף ראשון}label{testlabel}
subsection{תת-סעיף ראשון}label{testlabel2}

לה לה

לי לי

לו לו

pagebreak{}
section{סעיף שני}
subsection{תת-סעיף ראשון}

לה לה

subsection{תת-סעיף שני}

לי לי
חלק ref{testlabel}
אבגד
hyperref[testlabel2]{בדיקה ארוכה}

setLR
This is a test for LTR links. See section ref{testlabel} and hyperref[testlabel2]{long label}.
end{document}