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How to set up LyX under Windows to use it for Hebrew
Easy One-Click Installation (Recommended)
You can use the one-click installation Hebrew LyX distribution provided by Meital here(approve sites) (Google "meital lyx" if link does not work).
Installation (may not work for current version of LyX)
- Install MiKTeX for Windows
- Install LyX for Windows
- Download and run the culmusmiktex0.2.2.exe to install fonts and other needed Hebrew files.
- Go in the menu Tools → Preferences → Language Settings and check the Right-to-Left (RTL) Language Support check box (for older versions of LyX). Click Save. In case that the RTL support was not already activated, restart LyX.
- If LyX doesn't correctly accept your keyboard input, open the menu Tools → Preferences to use a keyboard map as shown in this screenshot (Note: in some versions of LyX, this setting is under Editing->Keyboard/Mouse). Then click Save and restart LyX.
Additional Guides
Visit the Hebrew LyX Facebook group(approve sites) for installation and usage guides.
Testing the Installation
- Run LyX and press Ctrl+N to open a new document. Write a few words in English, and press Ctrl+R.
A PDF viewer program should be opened; check that it displays the text correctly.
- Create another new document and call the menu Document → Settings.
Select there in the Document-class drop-list the class article (Hebrew).
Set the document language to Hebrew.
Type in a few words. Press Ctrl+R and check the output.
Creating a shortcut to switch the language
- Go to the LyX menu Tools→Preferences→Editing→Keyboard/Mouse and set first keyboard to null and second keyboard to hebrew.
- Go to the LyX menu Tools→Preferences→Editing→Shortcuts
- Search for the shortcut "language", select it and use the Modify button.
- In the appearing dialog change "language" to "language hebrew". Bind it to a key you want, for example to F12.
- Now search again for the shortcut "language", select it and use the Modify button.
- In the appearing dialog change "language" to "language english". Bind it to a key you want, for example to Ctrl+F12.
Now you can start typing, using F12 / Ctrl+F12 to switch between Hebrew and English.
Visual vs. Logical cursor movement
- In Tools → Preferences → Language Settings, you can select between "Visual" and "Logical" cursor movement. These options affect the direction of movement of your cursor in math-mode. Play around with these two options, and see what is best for you.
Possible problems
- You might encounter
"Font LHE/cmr/m/n/10=jerus10 at 10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found" error. It should be solved by going to Document → Settings → LaTeX Preamble and adding \usepackage{culmus}. You should then click "Save as Document Defaults".
- When you get a LaTeX error telling you that a character in a section heading can not be encoded and you should use a Unicode encoding like "utf8", set the document encoding in the menu Document → Settings → Language to "cp1255".
- When upgrading MiKTeX to a new version like from 2.8 to 2.9 you need to repeat step 2 in order to have the Hebrew fonts installed in the new LaTeX-distribution.
- If you do not see Hebrew, check that LyX's preferences are properly set (Check if the screen fonts support Hebrew).
- If nothing happen when you press Ctrl+R after changing the document's class to article (Hebrew), try also setting Document→Settings→Language→Hebrew
- If you succeed in viewing an English DVI file, but fail with the Hebrew one, there is a problem with the Hebrew TeX packages.
Assure that culmusmiktex0.2.2.exe extracted the files to MiKTeX's config directory (~:\Documents and Settings\all users\Application Data\MiKTeX\<MiKTeX version number>\) while you had admin permissions.
- If you have several partitions it might be possible culmus installed in the right folder but at the wrong partition. Check the drive letter when installing culmus.
- In order to work properly in Hebrew, You should let LyX map the keyboard layout by itself: Windows' keyboard layout must be "English" all the time, and you should switch language only using lyx (setting F12 as language switcher, as described in this page). This will ensure that you write in a proper language-environment, and will automatically switch to English when you enter math-mode.
- Some modules will interfere with PDF rendering in Hebrew documents. If you cannot render to PDF, go to Document → Settings → Modules and delete the enabled ones.
Notes
- It is possible to add new templates to LyX. Place the template files in
~:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\LyX2.0\templates. Then reconfigure LyX by using the menu Tools → Reconfigure and restart LyX.
- It is probably advised to set in the preferences menu the option right-to-left language support to on.
References (not only for Windows)
Windows Hebrew
