Add support for vowels (nikud) in Hebrew (and Arabic?)

[Dov Feldstern]

Hebrew and Arabic use "points" ("nikud" in Hebrew, I think it's "tashkil" in
Arabic) to signify the vowels. These points are composed of dots or lines which
appear above, inside, or below the letters.

This is not a major issue, because nikud is normally omitted, but it would be
nice to have.

It seems that LyX may have supported this feature sometime in the past (the
sources still contain a lot of code which pertains to this), but it hasn't
supported this feature fully for quite a while (I have tried using it in Hebrew
in 1.3.X with only partial success).

In order to get it fully working, work would need to be done on both the
frontend (display the nikud in the correct positions -- currently it's usable,
but slightly off), and the backend (currently, latex chokes on the nikud symbols).

Some references which may be useful:

• see #3040, and its resolution
• ​http://nikud.berlios.de/ is a package which provides Hebrew nikud for latex

(and also, incidentally, uses culmus fonts). I have had success using it as
follows: type files in LyX, with nikud; then, export to latex, and change the
\usepackage{babel} to \usepackage{culmus} (after having set the package up
correctly). That's all --- the output is generated correctly. In my opinion, it
would be best for LyX to automatically use this package for Hebrew instead of
babel (it includes babel). However, I don't understand enough about how latex
works, and latex packages, to do this in a robust way. (As far as I know , this

package is not in CTAN.)

[Georg Baum]

Since the nikud package implements an algorithm by Sivan Toledo, and since he
is a LyX user himself it might be possible that he knows something about the
partially existing nikud support in LyX. Or maybe Dekel.
Maybe you can ask them?

[Dov Feldstern]

See #3613 for more details on nikud support. Apparently ivritex 1.2.1
supports nikud, but there are some issues with this version of ivritex which
have to be worked out...

[Uwe Stöhr]

Dov, is there progress in ivritex in supporting nikud?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

I just tested a bit, and it seems that Nikud are at least partially supported now (if the font provides the respective glyphs).

Hebuser, can you say something about that?

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

Guy, can you help us here? How is the status of this request? It seems to me Nikud do work (at least partially).

[Guy Rutenberg]

Works as expected with XeTeX. I think this issue can be closed as fixed. Note that in LyX itself you do need a screen font that supports Nikud (DejaVu Serif support most of it but not some esoteric ones).

[Juergen Spitzmueller]

OK. Thanks for checking.