Hebrew on virtual consoles

[Boruch Baum]

I wanted to propose an update to the Linux Hebrew HOW-TO that exists
here[1], and supposedly also here[2]; however, my attempt to contact the
maintainer listed there has failed.

Although that documentation is quite old, it still is the principal
English-language guide on the subject, so if my proposals have merit,
there should be some way to amend the document. Is anyone on this list
able to contact the author?

What I wanted to address in that document was to update how it directs
users to configure Hebrew for virtual consoles (ie. not within X11) in
order to account for modern unicode fonts.

I'm experimenting now, using debian 9, and I find:

a) /usr/share/consolefonts includes some unicode fonts that
   include Hebrew (eg. setfont Uni1-{foo}), but most don't seem to.

b) /usr/share/consolefonts doesn't include the Joel Hoffman font
   mentioned in the HOWTO, but it does include several non-unicode
   Hebrew-* ones (eg. setfont Hebrew-VGA14).

c) For proper unicode support, there now exist commands 'unicode_start'
   and 'unicode_stop'. The command 'kbd_mode' will tell you if you're in
   unicode mode.

d) For people who have defined more than two keyboard layouts in
   /etc/default/keyboard, the toggling amongst them within a virtual
   console operates differently than it does within an X11 virtual
   terminal. The toggling sequence is layout-1, layout-2, layout-1,
   layout-3, ... layout-1, layout-n.

references:
-----------
[1] http://wiki.tldp.org/Hebrew-HOWTO
[2] http://shekel.jct.ac.il/~rajwan/Hebrew.html

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