LaTeX and math question

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012, Lior Kaplan wrote about "LaTeX and math question":
> Hi,
> 
> Could someone look the question here:
> http://www.gadial.net/2012/07/11/help_me_latex_people/
> (an open request for help)
> 
> Gadi is also CCed to this mail, so you can answer here.
> 
> Kaplan

The problem his he doesn't seem to have a single question, but rather a
whole list of features that simply don't work correctly, and need to be
fixed. This doesn't require help on the mailing list, but rather someone
who is a combination of someone who cares, and someone who likes to
program when things get tough - to actually go and fix these problems.

I reminds me how 14 years ago I was happily writing my MSc thesis in
English with LaTeX, when suddenly the Technion decided that MSc theses,
unlike Ph.D., *must* be written in Hebrew, which is after all the
official language of our country (and of the Technion). So I thought to
myself - how hard can this be? There was already some Hebrew support to
LaTeX, there were some Hebrew fonts, so what could go wrong?

But it turns out, that everything that could go wrong - did. Like Gadi
said, typesetting a book (or in my case, a thesis) is not the same as
priting a letter. Every advanced LaTeX feature I tried to use - Table of
contents, bibtex, multi-column text, indexes, everything was screwed up
in Hebrew, sometimes badly and sometimes subtly. Even simpler but more
esoteric LaTeX features didn't work correctly in Hebrew. To fix these
problems I had to go knee-deep into LaTeX's source code (which, as you
know, is written in TeX) and actually fix code and write code. Quite a
lot of code.

Unfortunately, the work I did then now belongs in the trash can of
history, because I did it in LaTeX 2.09, but the current version of
LaTeX, 2e, has almost no common code with the previous version.
But the good news is that supposedly (though I didn't try myself), the
Hebrew support we already have in LaTeX 2e is much better than the one
I got in LaTeX 2.09 when I started to improve it. So supposedly, fixing
the features which are still broken in Hebrew shouldn't be *too*
difficult, assuming that you know TeX and don't mind a bit of hard-core
TeX programming. Like I said, getting some of these issues fixed will
need a person to come along with similar circumstances like mine -
someone who loves TeX, loves to program, and is *forced* to use Hebrew
LaTeX and can't switch to either English or something like OpenOffice.
I'm not sure how much these circumstances happen today :(

BTW, If you're curious you can see my thesis (typeset in LaTeX 2.09) here:
http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~nyh/thesis.ps.gz
And a short report I wrote about typesetting Hebrew with my LaTeX 2.09
improvements, here:
http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~nyh/pub/report.ps.gz



-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Thursday, Jul 12 2012, 22 Tammuz 5772
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |If you notice this notice, you'll notice
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |it's not worth noticing but is noticable.