On 29.04.19 14:24, Guenter Milde wrote: > On 2019-04-28, Guy Rutenberg wrote: > >> I think for 99% of the users writing in Hebrew, XeTeX is the (only) >> reasonable choice for writing in Hebrew. There are many broken things >> pdfTeX when it comes to Hebrew (and RTL languages), and fonts are only one >> of them (another example is hyperref). > > I agree with this for documents with Hebrew as main language where Xe- or > LuaTeX make things a lot easier. > > The situation is somewhat different for the use case of documents in > other languages containing just some quote or word in Hebrew. Here, many > users may want to stick to 8-bit LaTeX with TeX fonts because of > stability, compilation speed, special requirements or setup. So LyX > should support this as good as possible. > >
To me it appears as if the situation is *even worse* in the usage scenario "just some Hebrew", or better "mixed scripts". Think linguists, hebraists, theologians etc. These will often not use a single Hebrew word in an otherwise Latin script sentence, but fragment of sentences, paragraphs etc. If you care one bit about typography, you usually want to control it. And both solutions mentioned mix imo quite awfully with what I want or have to use. For all the reasons you listed I hated switching to XeTeX, but it appeared as the only sensible option. I ran into problems with pdfLaTeX that were very difficult to circumvent or solve, sometimes impossible to surmount. Problems that were either easy to solve with XeTeX or never there in the first place. I asked around in on this list, in other forums, inquired theologians and Israelis about this. Not a single soul recommended to stick with pdfLaTeX, all said XeTeX is the way to go by now. Except for a very old academic who wrote his big piece in LaTeX and shared his solution with me. He didn't remember how he did it or came up with most of the tricks employed. It was arcane. It was by far not very elegant. I saw the output, from back then, but couldn't reproduce it. If upstream doesn't have a nice solution for this, then I really applaud every effort LyX attempts to make this better. It is really awful right now. But the shortage of dev-power suggests that to me that perfecting XeTeX support would be a priority. greetings Mike
