The Hebrew HOWTO

• Index
• Introduction
• Standards for representation of Hebrew characters
• Virtual Consoles (VCs)
• X Windows setup - XFree86 3.1
• Shells setup.
• Applications
• Printer setup
• Commercial products.
• Hebrew around the Internet.

6. Applications

6.1 Vim

• The Vim is a Vi IMproved editor with some enhanced commands and the hebrew support was made bu Dov Grobgeld (HED developer).
• Another Vim patch announced by Avner Lottem, lottem@techunix.technion.ac.il and can be obtained from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/vi/vim3.0-rlh0.1.tgz.
• For more info, you can look at http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gil/var.html

6.2 Hebrew pine and pico

The pine and it's additional editor pico had been changed by Helen Zommer from CC-huji and has a bug-report mail: pineh-bug@horizon.cc.huji.ac.il. It can be down-loaded from ftp://horizon.cc.huji.ac.il/pub.

6.3 Some emacs Hebrew ports.

• Hebrew package by Joseph Friedman. It includes some Hebrew fonts in BDF format, patch for emacs 18.58 and an elisp package. It is fine, but nobody uses emacs 18.* anymore. It can be obtained from: ftp://archive.cis.ohio-state.edu/pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/misc/Hebrew.tar.Z.
• A very simple Hebrew package. Includes only right-to-left cursor movement support and right-to-left sorting. Works without any patches with FSF emacs 19. Can be obtained from ftp://archive.cis.ohio-state.edu/pub/gnu/emacs/elisp-archive/misc/Hebrew.el.Z.
• One of emacs branches - MULE (Multi Lingual Emacs) Supports a lot of languages including Hebrew. It compiles and runs under Linux with no problem. It is full Emacs, with Hebrew support and double-direction handling. It can be obtained from: ftp://kelim.jct.ac.il/pub/Hebrew

6.4 Dosemu

For a VC dosemu you can use your Hebrew from the Video card EPROM, and if you don't have it there are plenty of Hebrew dos fonts from EGA support to the VGA Hebrew support.

For X-Windows support you should download the file: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts/hebxfonts-0.1.tgz it's contain some fonts include one called vgah.pcf that you should install it on your fonts directory as describe above the fonts are:

6.5 XHTerm

There is a main port of the regular X-Term program for use with a Hebrew fonts - XHTerm = xterm + Hebrew support. The port for a sun machine was made avalible by the help of Danny <tt>danny@cs.huji.ac.il</tt>. Evgeny has some patch for use this port under Linux. His version should come with a pre-compiled XHTerm for both X11R5 and X11R6. You should use xhterm with the option -fn and a Hebrew font as described! Danny's port (for SUN) can be obtained from: ftp://ftp.huji.ac.il/pub/local/xhterm and the patched version of Evgeny Stambulchik is on: ftp://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/pub/software/linux Get it from there and you'll get 5 fonts with it: [heb10x20.pcf, heb6x13.bdf, heb6x13.pcf, heb8x13.bdf, heb8x13.pcf]

6.6 TeX--XeT - Hebrew Tex.

The bigest problem with Tex with Hebrew is that the charecters should go backwards relative to Visual look (i.e. pico inserts the charecters from right to left), so the best thing is to get XHterm with a regular emacs and write the Hebrew left to right, backwards as well.

The newer NTeX distribution on sunsite (v1.5) includes everything, including TeX--XeT, precompiled for Linux. It can be obtained from ftp://sunsite.unc.edu.gz/pub/Linux/apps/tex/ntex. An older version of TeX--XeT can be obtained from ftp://noa.huji.ac.il/tex. This older version, however, has to be recompiled (not recommended).

These TeX distributions are fine if you use LaTeX2.09. If you want to use LaTeX2e (the current de facto standard) you have a problem. Alon Ziv (alonz@csa.cs.technion.ac.il) is currently working in support for LaTeX2e with Hebrew, using the Babel languages system. I don't know the current status of his work -- ask him!