Guy Rutenberg

It’s been a bit more than three years since I’ve written about a workaround for getting hyperref to play (almost) nicely with Hebrew. Over the past few weeks, I saw I rising interest in this and few people contacted me regarding this issue. So I thought it’s a good opportunity to better document the current situation, and possible ways that should be further investigated which I believe might lead to better solutions.
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The David font that is used in Culmus-LaTeX lacks support of Kav-Mafrid, the ligature that is created by two consecutive dashes, --. Because the regular Hebrew dash, Maqaf, is position near the top of the line, one can’t use it instead of the Kav-Mafrid and expect a graphically pleasant result (while Kav-Mafrid can replace Maqaf and the text would still look ok). To make things even more problematic, this ligature is supported by Culmus-LaTeX’s default font, Frank Ruehl, which means one can’t easily switch fonts without hurting the layout.
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The hyperref package is notoriously known to cause problem with RTL text, which unfortunately include 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, to port the workaround to pdfTeX, which is more popular.
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For a while now I’ve refrained from using the very nice Algorithm environment for LaTeX papers I wrote in Hebrew due to the way it’s label was displayed. The English label was displayed in reverse.

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On Monday, I’ve submitted a patch to the LyX developers mailing list with a fix for the numbering direction in Hebrew text. In Hebrew text the dot appeared before the numbering symbol instead of after it as it should.

This behaviour has been this way for years (at least as long as I can remember).
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Recently I’ve worked on a Hebrew document in LaTeX and wanted to use the split environment to typeset some multiline formula. The document which compiled just fine till that point, failed to compile with the following error:

Package amsmath Error: \begin{split} won't work here.

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Few days ago I finally decided to install Ivritex-1.2.1 on my system. I’m running a tetex-3.0. The new version of Ivritex includes some very important improvements and, at least for me, the most important thing is support for the Culmus fonts. tetex-3.0 introduced a major directory change which cause many problem with installing packages which are unaware of the changes. In this post I will try to walk through the installation process.

TEXMF will be the directory of you local TeX tree (usually /usr/share/texmf). Before Begining the installation process make sure you have the Culmus fonts installed. Apparently Culmus is not optional it’s a requirement. I’ll assume that your Culmus fonts are installed in /usr/share/fonts/culmus.

1. Download the ivritex-1.2.1 source-code from here .
2. Extract the archive into a temporary directory.
3. Save the diff file below a file named “Makefile_patch” and save it inside ivritex-1.2.1/fonts/culmus .
4. Apply the patch by going to the ivritex-1.2.1/fonts/culmus directory (under the directory where you extracted the source archive) and executing “patch Makefile_patch. The patch will alter the places where some file will be installed.
5. As root execute “updmap –enable Map culmus.map”.
6. Still as root execute “mktexlsr”.
7. Ivritex 1.2.1 should be installed now.

--- Makefile	2007-02-14 19:59:52.000000000 +0200
+++ Makefilenew	2007-02-16 10:11:07.000000000 +0200
@@ -20,8 +20,8 @@
 vf_target     = $(TEX_ROOT)/fonts/vf/culmus
 # this is where ivritex will eventually be:
 tex_target    = $(TEX_ROOT)/tex/generic/babel
-encode_dir    = $(TEX_ROOT)/dvips/base
-dvips_cfg_dir = $(TEX_ROOT)/dvips/config
+encode_dir    = $(TEX_ROOT)/fonts/enc/dvips/base
+map_dir       = $(TEX_ROOT)/fonts/map/
 sysconf       = $(DESTDIR)/etc
 updmap_dir    = $(sysconf)/texmf/updmap
 #culmus_target = $(PREFIX)/fonts/culmus
@@ -137,11 +137,11 @@
 	mkdir -p $(sysconf)/texmf/updmap.d
 	echo "Map culmus.map" >$(sysconf)/texmf/updmap.d/10culmus.cfg
 else
-	mkdir -p $(dvips_cfg_dir)
-	cp culmus.map $(dvips_cfg_dir)/
+	mkdir -p $(map_dir)
+	cp culmus.map $(map_dir)/
   ifeq ($(tetex_ver),2)
 	# this should run mktexlsr as well
-	$(updmap) --enable Map $(dvips_cfg_dir)/culmus.map
+	$(updmap) --enable Map $(map_dir)/culmus.map
   else # for tetex-1
     ifeq ($(tetex_ver),1)
 	# TODO: fill in sed line here

This guide is base on a guide published by Dekel Tsur that can be found here. Dekel Tsur’s guide was very good but now it is outdated since it doesn’t work with teTex 3.0. In this guide I addressed this issue and updated the instructions and scripts so it will work with teTex 3.0.Since the quality of the Hebrew metafonts that comes with the Hebrew LaTeX is quite poor, alternative fonts are needed. The best quality free Hebrew fonts are TrueType fonts (for example, the times new/arial/courier new fonts). Using TrueType fonts with TeX is somewhat complicated, but it is quite easy with pdfTeX, as pdfTeX has native support for TrueType fonts. This document explains how to use TrueType fonts with pdfTeX. Since Hebrew requires the use of the eTeX engine, you need to have the pdfelatex program. It is available in teTeX 1.0 (which comes with recent Linux distributions). The instruction below allows using nikud, although the result is quite poor as the nikud glyphs are not aligned correctly (but it is better than nothing).

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