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Alan Hoenig
City University of New York
ahoenig@suffolk.lib.ny.us
Wednesday July 23, 2003
It's easy (relatively so, at any rate) to typeset a language using a keyboard customized for that language. A more interesting problem arises when trying to set a `foreign' language (say, Russian, Hebrew, or Arabic) using a native keyboard (American, for example). This leads to the problem of transliteration: how can you represent some language, call it , using the conventions of a different language ?
This presentation concerns the author's attempted solution to one such
problem: to create quality Hebrew typesetting using the conventions of
an English language keyboard. Apart from the different alphabet,
which invokes a different set of sounds than does its English
counterpart, Hebrew can involve as many as two distinct sets of
diacritics, uses special glyph forms (sometimes) at word endings, and
is, of course, typeset from right to left. The solution involves
using the Omega superset of TEX. Makor, the name for this
Hebrew typesetting system, consists of a user manual, fonts from seven
distinct font families, and a special set of macros and conventions.
Many examples of its use will be shown. All this software is publicly
and freely available.
