Hebrew in Latex

Update: I no longer use culmus-LaTeX discussed below for Hebrew typesetting. I switched to the much superior XeLaTeX.

Page under construction!

To my surprise, Hebrew in Latex is mature enough that I find it less painful to write Hebrew mathematical text using LaTeX compared to the combination of MS Word 2007 & Mathtype which is the standard in my institution.

While the support of Hebrew in Latex seems to be solid, the documentation of the usage is somewhat spread over the web, which made me a bit worried considering the investment I have made in this format. I'm not trying to solve this problem, but rather to make a backup of documantations & tips under my control. Most of material here is therefore shamelessly stolen.

Most of the text below is copied (and edited) from other sites (which I refer below). My own remarks appear with grey background.

Installing Hebrew in Miktex 2.8

The following instructions are taken from here..

Installation

MikTeX with Hebrew Culmus fonts

• Install MikTeX 2.8
• The Hebrew fonts installation package is intended for use with MikteX version 2.6–2.8. If you have not installed MikTeX, or if you have an older version installed, download and install MikTeX 2.8 (the "Basic MikTeX" Installer). Make sure you install MikTeX for "anyone who uses this computer".
• Work with Administrator privileges
• Download and execute the Culmus-MikTeX installer [Ver 0.2.1 Local copy here (zipped)]
• This automated setup will install Culmus Hebrew fonts to the MikTeX directories, and configure MikTeX to use them. It will also remove older version of Culmus fonts (as the one which was available on this site).
• Click for further information on the Culmus-MikTeX package.
• Run from a command line prompt the command "updmap"

Details of the Hebrew Culmus fonts are taken from here:

An installation package of Hebrew Culmus fonts for MikTeX.

Current version: 0.2.1

Requirements

The package is intended for use with MikTeX version 2.6–2.8.

Users of earlier versions should install MikTeX 2.8. MikTeX should be installed for "anyone who uses this computer" (which is the default).

Download and Installation

• Download and execute Culmus-MikTeX.
• The automated setup will install Culmus Hebrew fonts to the MikTeX directories, and configure MikTeX to use them. It will also remove older version of Culmus fonts (as the one which was available on this site).
• The package can also be downloaded in non-executable format.

Usage and Examples

• After the installation, using the default MikTeX Babel package produces Hebrew text with the David font. The document preamble should contain the line:
• \usepackage[english,hebrew]{babel}
• This can be seen in this simple example. [Local copy here]
• The following standard Culmus fonts are included: Aharoni, Caladings, David, Drugulin, Ellinia, Frank Ruehl, Miriam Mono, and Nachlieli. In addition to these, three "fancy fonts" are included: Anka, Ktav Yad, Ozrad. Usage of these fonts is shown in this example. [local copy here]
• All fonts can be embedded in PDF files either with pdfLaTeX, dvipdfm or dvipdfmx. The latter is recommended, as it creates searchable Hebrew text.
• Also included: Culmus fonts with nikud (using the Nikud package) — Frank Ruehl, Miriam, and Nachlieli. A short example is available, along with a more involved one (from the Nikud project). DVI files with Nikud can be viewed in YAP by setting the rendering method to dvips. Alternatively, the DVI can be transformed to PS and PDF using dvips and ps2pdf.

Installing VI Editor with Hebrew support

For editing, I currently use gvim with Hebrew macros written by Tomer Kol. Instructions for installing Hebrew vi are from here. Below I copied some relevant parts

1. Installing GVim
   1. Download and install gvim from http://www.vim.org (from now on we will refer to the top level of the vim installation as $gvim [on my computer it is C:\Program Files\Vim]
2. Installing Hebrew Font
   1. On Windows platforms install "netextmo" font from "webheb" package (can belocated easily on the WWW) Location of webheb.exe package: http://www.brijnet.org/ivrit/webheb.exe [local copy here (zipped)]
   2. Move webheb.exe into an empty folder. Extract the package by running (double-click) webheb.exe . The installation of fonts is done via "Control panel"->Fonts and selecting installation of new fonts from the menu. Then browse to the directory containing the files extracted from the webheb fonts pakcage, select all fonts and choose "Install".
   3. Setup vim to use the Hebrew font from the package: Append the following line at the end of the file $gvim\_vimrc (needed for proper display/editing of Hebrew text only):
   4. set guifont=netextmo:h12
   5. (12 stands for height, use at least 12)
3. Installation of Latex Editing Environment and Hebrew switching hotkeys support.
   1. Installation of up-to-date gsview+ghostscript are recommended (you can find them by "google"-ing for ghostscript)
   2. [The text with yellowish background below can be skipped by downloading a local copy of TKlatex.vim into $gvim]
   3. Download the file containing the LaTeX editing environment (applies on Windows and non-Windows) from: http://ae-www.technion.ac.il/pkgs/t-z/vim/ (originally from http://tiger.technion.ac.il/~tomer/TeX/VIM/TKlatex.vim mirrorred with the permission of the author) into $gvim. The file is launched by the _vimrc file (installation of the call to this file follows further in this document). On Windows change the line (currently 726):
   4. let g:TKDVIviewer = "windvi"
   5. to:
   6. let g:TKDVIviewer = "yap"

Also add paths to "acrord32" and "gsview32" command on the two following lines to read according to the following examples; note that "linux-style" directory separators (slash) are used "/":

"C:/Program Files/Adobe/Acrobat 5.0 ME/Reader/acrord32"

"C:/Program Files/Ghostgum/gsview/gsview32"

In latest versions of MikTeX in the same section several lines above you should change "elatex" to "latex" - check which of the 2 latex compilers exists by running them in a CMD window - of course, latex should first be installed...

To use "Make PS" and "Make PDF" items in Latex menu add the following to the path (use the appropriate path of Ghostscript installation):

C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.51\lib

C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.51\bin

Download vimrc_example_latex.txt (from http://ae-www.technion.ac.il/pkgs/t-z/vim/) [local copy] into $gvim. Append to $gvim\_vimrc the following line

source $gvim/vimrc_example_latex.txt

(it contains useful stuff and a call that loads the TKLatex.vim ) Now launching GVim should result in a window with "Latex" and "Language" menus and <F9> hotkey for language and text direction switch between English and Hebrew.

Comments

1. The webpages referenced above also explain how to instal LyX with Hebrew support. I did not try it. It may be a better solution than VI. In particular, VI does not seem to support NIKUD.
2. Probably a better solution would be using XeLaTeX with the bidi package (which supports, among other things, the hyperref, and memior packages). I haven't tried this solution. One place to start with is http://en.foursenses.net/hebrewinxetex
3. Example: By now we wrote a draft of a complete study companion in Hebrew for the course in "Algorithms" based on the book "Algorithm deisgn" by Kleinberg and Tardos. I offer here the sources and pdf of two chapters of the study companion, zipped [madrich2.zip]. To compile it extract the files together with directory structure, and execute "pdflatex madrich".

Issues

1. The package amsthm (definition of theorem-like environments) is not compatible with Hebrew. Work around: Define your own theorem-like environment.
   1. For example, here is an environment for exercises (תרגיל)
      1. \newcounter{exercise}[chapter]
      2. \renewcommand{\theexercise}{\L{\thechapter.\arabic{exercise}}}
      3. \newcommand{\exer}[1][default] {\par\medskip\noindent\refstepcounter{exercise}\hbox{\bfseries \R{\hebtav\hebresh\hebgimel\hebyod\heblamed}~\theexercise\ \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{default}}{}{)#1(}}%
      4. \ignorespaces \fontfamily{aharoni}\selectfont}
      5. \def\endexer{\hfill$\clubsuit$\par\medskip}
      6. \newenvironment{exercise}{\exer}{\endexer}
   2. Figure placement in Hebrew mode is totally wrong. Work around: Put the \includegraphics in English mode. For example
      1. \begin{figure}[ht]
      2. \begin{otherlanguage}{english}
      3. \begin{center}
      4. \includegraphics{ch3-graph}
      5. \end{center}
      6. \end{otherlanguage}
      7. \caption{גרף בעל שני רכיבי קשירות}
      8. \label{fig:ch3:1}
      9. \end{figure}
2. Many problems in the interaction between Hebrew and the documentclasses "memoir" & "octav.
   1. Workaround: Use the standard latex documentclass "book" "\mainmatter" macro of the memoir package. instead, manually use
      1. at the front matter
         1. \renewcommand{\thepage}{\roman{page}}
      2. at the main matter
         1. \setcounter{page}{1}
         2. \renewcommand{\thepage}{\arabic{page}}
3. The reference \eqref{eq:number} Looks in Hebrew like ")13(" instead of "(13)". Work around: Put it in English mode \L{\eqref{eq:number}}
4. In the the "book" documentclass the running heading is the opposite. Work around: use the fancyheader package. I customized the headers as follows:
   1. \documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{book}
   2. \usepackage{fancyhdr}
   3. \pagestyle{fancy} \fancyhead{} \fancyhead[RO]{\slshape \rightmark} \fancyhead[LE]{\slshape \leftmark} \fancyfoot[C]{\thepage}
   4. It's for double sided printing where on the on side the chapter name, and on the other the section name
5. The package "algorithmic": does not produce line numbers with \usepackage[hebrew]{babel}
6. The package hyperref does not seem to work with hebrew. Too bad.
7. I have problem running pdflatex on Hebrew documents in Miktex 2.8 and the culmus package 0.2.1: got the error miktex-makemf fails. Solution: Run the updmap command manually, from a command window.

Figure Drawing with Ipe

I use Ipe 7 to draw figures. Here is a list of issues I encountered and workarounds.

1. Ipe uses pdflatex to produce text in the figure. When embedded in a Latex document, the text may "disappear" when producing a paper using pdflatex. The problem seems to be when figures were producing with different latex than the one used to compile the tex file. Solution: load the figure into Ipe and save them again (as pdf files).
2. Errors appears when trying to save a figure with some text as pdf. In this case check Help->Ipe configuration and find out where is the latex directory. Check there the files text.pdf and text.tex. If text.pdf is empty when it doesn't suppose, try executing the command "udpmap"
3. If you have figures in Ipe 6 pdf file, follow the following procedure: execute
   1. ipeextract <file>.pdf
   2. ipe6upgarde <file>.xml
   3. Open <file>.ipe using Ipe 7
   4. Enter the style sheet menu (<CTRL><SHIFT>S)
   5. change the list such that it will contain only "basic" and then "standard" style sheets.

Installing Hebrew Latex on Mac OS X

See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dC3vK-iFCz_fwCsB9fhYuIF607fw4W9Vu0PdBDhLM0E/mobilebasic?pli=1