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This question is concerned about writing a non-english document in LaTeX.

I compile my Hebrew document with pdfLaTeX. I know, XeLaTex or LuaLaTeX with the polyglossia package are Unicode engines, and are the recommended engines for non-Latin scripts. But I decided to stick to pdfLaTeX for its other useful features.

As I learned here, one can declare the Hebrew glyphs in the preamble, thus defining behavior for Unicode characters:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Specifies which font encoding LATEX should % use, (8-bit encoding (T1)) \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % Translate various standard and other % input encodings into a ‘LaTeX internal language‘ \usepackage{culmus} % Hebrew fonts from the Culmus project \usepackage[main=english, hebrew]{babel} % Multilingual support, % typographical (and other) rules \pdfmapfile{=culmus.map} % pdflatex now reads the file culmus.map, % which tells pdflatex how to get the font into the output file %% Declarations %% \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D0}{\hebalef} \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D1}{\hebbet} \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D2}{\hebgimel} % and so on, up to \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05EA}{\hebtav} %% Document %% \begin{document} כיתוב בעברית \end{document}

Now comes my question: I want to write down these 27 declarations in a separate file (probably a .sty or a .def file?) so as to make my preamble cleaner.

What is the correct way to do that?

What command should I pass to my latexmkrc file so that pdfLaTeX searches there for the declarations list?

Does the inputenx package can do this for me? If yes, then what argument should I pass to \usepackage[...]{inputenx}?

Any suggestion or help would be much appreciated.

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  • Out of curiosity, which features of PDFTeX did you need? Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 2:27
  • A good approach is to stick all the Hebrew set-up in a .sty file. Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 2:28
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    if you create such a list the best is to call it lheenc.dfu. Then it will be loaded automatically. If it is complete you could upload to ctan. Put it in a texmf tree e.g. in tex/latex/hebrew-unicode. Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 8:52
  • @ Davisor, XeTeX includes some of the pdfTeX primitives, but not currently all of them. Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 9:08
  • @Ulrike Fischer sorry, could you elaborate a bit about the path for the file? If I compile my project in overleaf, where should the file be saved inside my project? What command should be passed to a latexmkrc file? Commented Mar 16, 2021 at 16:26

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I think that a possible solution is to write the declarations in an external .sty file, and call it from the preamble.

% file hebrewDeclarations.sty %% Declarations %% \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D0}{\hebalef} \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D1}{\hebbet} \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05D2}{\hebgimel} % and so on, up to \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{05EA}{\hebtav}

Whereas the tex file is:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Specifies which font encoding LATEX should % use, (8-bit encoding (T1)) \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % Translate various standard and other % input encodings into a ‘LaTeX internal language‘ \usepackage[main=english, hebrew]{babel} % Multilingual support, % typographical (and other) rules \usepackage{hebrewDeclarations} % Reference to the external sty file %% Document %% \begin{document} כיתוב בעברית \end{document}
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