Recently I’ve worked on a Hebrew document in LaTeX and wanted to use the split environment to typeset a multiline formula. The document, which compiled just fine until that point, failed to compile with the following error:
Package amsmath Error: begin{split} won't work here.
Continue reading Notes About Using amsmath split Environment in Hebrew Documents
A few days ago, I finally decided to install IvriTeX-1.2.1 on my system. I’m running 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 causes many problems when installing packages that are unaware of the changes. In this post, I will try to walk through the installation process.
TEXMF will be the directory of your local TeX tree (usually /usr/share/texmf). Before beginning 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.
--- 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 based 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 Dekel Tsur’s guide was very good, but now it is outdated since it doesn’t work with teTeX 3.0.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 they will work with teTeX 3.0. Since the quality of the Hebrew metafonts that come with Hebrew LaTeX is quite poor, alternative fonts are needed. The best-quality free Hebrew fonts are TrueType fonts (for example, the Times New Roman/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 instructions below allow using nikud, although the result is quite poor as the nikud glyphs are not aligned correctly (but it is better than nothing).