[Pkg-lyx-devel] Bug#823811: Bug#823811: LyX: missing out-of-the box support for Hebrew

[Georg Baum]

Hi Tzafrir,

thank you very much for the report.

Am 09.05.2016 um 12:05 schrieb Tzafrir Cohen:
> Package: lyx
> Version: 2.1.4-2
> Severity: minor
>
> Dear Maintainer,
>
> I'm not much of a LaTeX / LyX user myself anymore, but decided to report
> this following a discussion I had in a community forum recently.
>
> When I try to use Hebrew with LyX and can either:
>
>
> Use the default (pdflatex):
> In that case Hebrew support is through babel. The fonts it points to are
> a set of fonts not really available anywhere. At the time I packaged
> Hebrew support for babel that included usage of the culmus fonts.
>
> I guess some extra effort could be put into making the Culmus fonts the
> default ones (the originals were a set of low quality fonts of dubious
> legal status).

That would need to be solved at LaTeX level, or did I misunderstand 
something? To my knowledge, LyX does not load any special hebrew fonts.

> Use xelatex:
> In that case Hebrew support is through polyglossia (and implicitly:
> bidi). Works generally better. However:
>
> * The LyX user interface still fails to "reverse" Hebrew. I would have
>    expected a QT-based program to do that. This is an issue I would
>    probably take upstream.

Yes, this is definitely upstream. Some work has been done for RTL 
support for the upcoming 2.2.0 release. It would be nice if you could 
test whether the situation has improved in this version: 
ftp://ftp.lyx.org/pub/lyx/devel/lyx-2.2/lyx-2.2.0rc1

Unfortunately there is a lack of RTL languages upstream, so your testing 
would be very valuable. RTL bugs in the 2.1.x line will mot likely not 
being fixed anymore, the 2.2 line is the one where all work goes ATM.

> * Debian comes with several good font sets that have a good coverage of
>    Hebrew, as well as many other scripts (for instance: Deja-Vu). Yet, I
>    need to explicitly set the serif font of the document in order for
>    documents with Hebrew texts to render. Can't the default be changed?
This would probbaly be a debian specific default, to be made by the 
packager, and would require that the LyX package depends on some font 
packages. Upstream cannot assume anything about installed fonts. 
Unfortunately LyX does not have a proper debian maintainer at the moment.


Georg