Hebrew LaTeX

Preliminaries

These installation instructions were written for MiKTeX 2.4, available at www.miktex.org. You should download and install the basic system, that is, use the "Small MiKTeX" installer. Upon installation, MiKTeX creates two main folders. The first is \localtexmf. The second is either \texmf or \program files\miktex (you choose which). I recommend \texmf, since it seems more standard. If for some reason you chose \program files\miktex, please make the obvious changes in the instructions below.

Example files

Unpack hebexmpl.zip to some temporary directory. We will use these files later on.

Fonts and other files

The following 3 files were compiled from ivritex-1.1.2-dist.tar.gz, available from ivritex.sourceforge.net. Note that, ivritex-1.1.2-dist.tar.gz contains other files (namely, class and style files, as well as documentation), which I did not include here.

Unpack hebfonts.zip and copy to texmf\fonts\source\hebrew.
Unpack generic.zip and copy to texmf\tex\generic\0ivritex. The 0 is not a typo.
Unpack bibtex.zip and copy to texmf\bibtex\bst\ivritex.

You now need to refresh MiKTeX's internal filename database. To do this run the "MiKTeX Options" program (accessible from the Start menu via the MiKTeX tab). Click on the "Refresh Now" button.

Editing

I use a simple bidirectional editor: HED by Dov Grobgeld. It is DOS based, but other than that it is quite functional. I know that other people prefer notepad, or winedt.

Installing the relevant files

Download hed.zip and copy hed.exe and hebvga.exe to \texmf\miktex\bin (which is in the search path). You might also want to print hedkeys.doc for easy reference.
One of the drawbacks of HED is that it uses a DOS codepage for Hebrew, which is otherwise nonstandard. I wrote a small program to switch between the DOS encoding and the other more standard windows/unix encoding. Download dwconv.zip and copy dwconv.exe to \texmf\miktex\bin.

Using HED and friends

To use HED you need to be in a full screen DOS window with Hebrew fonts installed.

Open a command prompt (DOS window). You can either choose this from the relevant sub-menu in the start button, or you can choose "run" from the start button and type cmd.
Type hebvga at the prompt. The scroll bar should dissapper.
Click on the window's upper frame (the blue part) with the right mouse button. Choose "Properties" and then select "Full screen". You should now get a somewhat warped text screen.
Type hebvga at the prompt (yes, again). The text screen should now look OK.

We are now ready to play around with TeX.

Change directories so that we are working in the directory where the example files are.
Type l (that's ell, not one). This runs l.bat which contains the line "latex latex.tex". If all went well you should now have a file called latex.dvi. If there was an error, this is a probable cause: On older distributions, you have to run elatex as opposed to latex.
Type y, thus running y.bat which contains the line "yap latex". You should now be running yap in the standard windows environment, and it should be displaying the file you've just compiled.
Close Yap and go back to the DOS window. Run e.bat. The HED editor appears. Note that you can switch directions using the F10 key. Make some changes and save them with Alt+S, then quit with Alt+Q.
Compile the changes with l.bat and view them with y.bat.