http://www.echoofeden.com/digest/slaveofone/2007/02/14/writing-hebrew-in-openoffice-under-linux/

Writing Hebrew in OpenOffice under Linux
by slaveofone





This quick tutorial is provided to help those who, like myself, are or have been interested in utilizing Hebrew in OpenOffice under the KDE desktop.

I’m going to assume, first of all, that you’ve downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice. Apparently, versions previous to 2.0.0 have been somewhat buggy trying to render vowel points/diacritics or nikud. Since I’m using Fedora Core 5, I simply used my package manager to update everything and install any extra language components. It doesn’t hurt to update KDE to the lastest release either.

Next, download the SBL Hebrew font from the Society of Biblical Literature website. This is a Unicode Hebrew font (which means you can copy and paste the Hebrew into other software applications and it will be recognized and displayed correctly). Trust me when I say this Hebrew font looks immaculate.

Once you have the font, install it in your KDE Control Center (kcontrol in the terminal) under System Administration – Font Installer

While you’re in Control Center, you need to enable a Hebrew keyboard (so that when you type, it will display Hebrew characters instead of English ones).

click on Regional and Accessibility – Keyboard Layout – double click on Israel (il) to add it

Note: To enable use of vowel points/diacritics or nikud, go to "layout variant" and select "lyx". Now you can write vowels.

Hit apply.

KDE automatically generated a keystroke shortcut for you to switch easily between English and Hebrew keyboards (CTL+ALT+K). To check or change your keystroke shortcut, go to Keyboard Shortcuts. I changed mine to CTL+ALT+Up Arrow.

Lastly, set up OpenOffice.

Go to Tools – Options – Language Settings – Languages – and check to see that Complex Text Language (CTL) is enabled. Then set SBL Hebrew as your default font in Format – Character – CTL font.

Hopefully, you already have two buttons in your menu bar which change the direction of writing from a "left-to-right" orientation to a "right-to-left" one. If not, the default shortcuts are CTL+SHIFT+A (left-to-right) and CTL+SHIFT+D (right-to-left).

Diacritical marks are:


* SHIFT+E = qamets/quamets-chatuf

* SHIFT+R = dagesh/shureq

* SHIFT+U = cholem/cholem-vav

* SHIFT+P = patach

* SHIFT+A = sheva

* SHIFT+S = dagesh/shureq

* SHIFT+G = cholem/cholem-vav

* SHIFT+H = the mark for shin

* SHIFT+J = chireq

* SHIFT+X = segol

* SHIFT+C = qibbuts

* SHIFT+V = chatef-segol

* SHIFT+B = chatef-patach

* SHIFT+N = chatef-qamets

* SHIFT+M = tsere


Check out the keyboard chart map below and get your Hebrew on.


5 Responses to “Writing Hebrew in OpenOffice under Linux”






* #370

* April 9th, 2007

* 1721



Fantastic post. Took hours to find something which would simply explain how keyboards and Unicode work on Linux. Sadly I’m a newbie to Linux (Ubuntu) and am used to Keyman on Windows systems.

Thanks,

Joshua








Do you know how to make vowel points a different color than the consonants. I would like to be able to type a consonant, switch the color, and then type the vowel point in a different color, but this doesn’t work. Any ideas? Thanks.



Reply to Josh’s comment




3.






nadav kavalerchik Says:





* #1039

* February 8th, 2008

* 1501



as far as i know the si1452 is a more standard punctuation layout as defined by the Israeli standards institute.

Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu have it ready by default

(along side with lyx)

i use the following configuration in the xorg.conf file to enable Win+NUM for the various punctuation marks.

Option "XkbLayout" "us,il"

Option "XkbVariant" ",si1452"

Option "XkbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll,lv3:lwin_switch"

keyboard layout : http://culmus.sourceforge.net/si1452.html

:-)



Reply to nadav kavalerchik’s comment




4.






Philip Aston Says:





* #1105

* April 10th, 2008

* 1506



Assisting with Shul magazine… regrettably I couldn’t get culmus working, but the simple device of adding the font from this website- and your excellent advice- has solved it. And you do have to change the keyboard toggle shortcut, because Ctrl Alt K isn’t recognized in the ivrit keyboard!



Reply to Philip Aston’s comment




5.






zahav Says:





* #1227

* November 7th, 2009

* 0119



This post is quite old, but what I enjoy from it is new. I have tried many ways in controlling niqudot, but this is the best solution I found. Thanks a lot.

* Resources

date format in the output from "ls -l"

Yes, the default has changed. You can change the default with TIME_STYLE
environment variable, like this:

export TIME_STYLE=long-iso

Related tips here:
http://people.debian.org/~osamu/pub/po4a/html/ch09.en.html#_customized_display_o
f_time_and_date

nice set of tutorials for debian and discussion

hat tip
teemu likonen

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/debian-reference.en.html#_cus
tomized_display_of_time_and_date

/etc/default/keyboard replaces /etc/X11/xorg.conf as place for control of keyboard settings. intereresting

notice that this information was originally present in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it got transfered over.

reading the file
# If you change any of the following variables and HAL and X are
# configured to use this file, then the changes will become visible to
# X only if HAL is restarted. In Debian you need to run
# /etc/init.d/hal restart

this seems false to me. needs a reboot to modify in my case.


# The following variables describe your keyboard and can have the same
# values as the XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions options
# in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

XKBMODEL="pc104"
XKBLAYOUT="us,il"
XKBVARIANT="lyx"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"

# If you don't want to use the XKB layout on the console, you can
# specify an alternative keymap. Make sure it will be accessible
# before /usr is mounted.
# KMAP=/etc/console-setup/defkeymap.kmap.gz

-------------
also the setting in /etc/default/console-settings control the font and stuff in console mode. so can choose Uni1 instead of latin15 to get hebrew characters from the console

how to combine directory of pdf files into one

assume they are arranged in alphabetical order then


gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combined.pdf -dBATCH *.pdf