Why?

First of all, why is this page here at all?

I have started writing my sermons and papers in LaTeX. However, soon after I started and became enamored of it I realized that using any other language than English was quite difficult. So, I am posting this page so that if you somehow find this page, it might be a help to you.

Second, why LaTeX?

LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG text editor. The whole typesetting process can be taken care of after you are done typing. This might seem like a step backward instead of a step forward. But there have been many times I have spent three or more hours writing my sermons simply because I was playing around with the fonts and colors and spelling and other details instead of actually writing what I wanted to write. The goal of LaTeX is to write first and take care of the other stuff after you are done.

Greek and Hebrew

If you have used greek and Hebrew with conventional word processors it can be difficult sometimes to make the fonts look the right way. With LaTeX (or in the case of this tutorial, XeTeX), making Greek and Hebrew fonts look the right way is possible. And the result can be quite beautiful.

A Second Opinion

Before reading any further, it might be a good idea to check out this blog: LaTeX and XeTeX FOR THEOLOGIANS. Elo knows more about this stuff and is probably better organized. But, in case you’d like to hear my version of Greek and Hebrew in LaTeX, go ahead and read.

Two paths

The generic path to follow is LaTeX. LaTeX is usable on any platform. I have a mac and make use of XeTeX. From this point on I will only be speaking of XeTeX. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• I have a mac and only use a mac.
• While there are ways of making use of Greek and Hebrew Languages with LaTeX, it is a much more complicated process.

Getting XeTeX

Download

The first step is to download The MacTeX-2008 Distribution. It’s a big file, but worth the download. After you have downloaded the file, follow the install instructions.

Text Editors

Within the folder you have downloaded, you will find the application, TeXShop. TeXShop can type and process documents. But, in case you wanted more options there are other text editors you can use. I use BBEdit. It has the advantage of having a built-in spelling checker. It also has a LaTeX dictionary you can download. I’d go on about how wonderful it is, but you can check it out for yourself.

If you would like a free text editor, there are also options. There is TextWrangler. It is made by the same people who make BBEdit. I haven’t used it myself. But I have been told that it has LaTeX support. And, of course, if you want to be really geeky, you can always use a command-line version of a text editor like vim or emacs. The learning curve with these text editors is quite steep. But if you master them you can work much more efficiently than using a mouse and keyboard (or so I’m told). To start with vim open up the utilities folder (shift + command + u) and double click on “Terminal.” If you are afraid of the terminal (and if you don’t know what you’re doing there is good reason to be), you can download an aqua-ized version that is somewhat easier to use. If you would like to learn how to use vim, you can always download a tutorial. To find out more information about vim you can go to their website. To find out about emacs, you can go their website. Here is also another site which might help you get emacs for mac os X.

Using XeTeX

After you have downloaded the mac-tex distribution and chosen a suitable text editor, now you can start the fun.

Templates

You can download the templates I have worked with here. I used these to get the greek and the right-to-left Hebrew working .

Processing

You can prepare TeXShop for XeTeX by consulting this page. If you are using BBEdit, you might want to download this script. It allows you to export your XeTeX document to TeXShop directly from BBEdit.

Fonts

Instead of making a big list of greek and hebrew unicode fonts here. I thought it might be best to just include a link here to a .pdf. I used to include a list of fonts here. But, in order to see what the fonts look like, it would be better to look at the .pdf file and download the fonts from the links in the file.

Text Input

It is also good to note that there are options for inputting text into your XeTeX document. I use the bible/exegetical application Accordance. They have a very intuitive and easy to use keyboard layout. For example, the application automatically adds a final sigma, mem, nun (etc). Just make sure you have it set to export to unicode in the preferences.

Another option for the greek is Sophokeys. This is a keyboard addition which gives you a new keyboard layout. The key bindings are in-line with Thesaurus Linguae Graecae standards.

Conclusion

I realize this isn’t an overly-exhaustive tutorial. But, if I’ve let you down in the process somewhere, please let me know and I’ll try to update this page accordingly. Also, like I mentioned earlier, it might be a good idea to also consult Elo’s blog.

Miscelaneous Goodies

Over the last several months I have found some stuff which others might be able to use.

Calc2LaTeX

Calc2LaTeX is an open office macro for their spreadsheet. It converts the fields in the spreadsheet into a LaTeX table. You can then copy the table and place it into your your LaTeX (XeTeX) file. Here’s the link: Calc2LaTeX

XeTeX>HTML

This is a text factory I made for BBEdit to convert my XeTeX files to .html. It’s not perfect. And the code is probably not pretty from an .html coding point of view (I don’t want any nerdy, html dorfnarr sending me condescending comments about my lack of html coding ability!). It works for changing a basic XeTeX document into something ready to be placed into an .html document. Here is the link: XeTeX-HTML

HTML>RTF

• Mac Os X comes with the terminal ‘textutil’ command. It’s pretty nifty. So I made a shellscript which converts anything with a .html extension on your Desktop into an .rtf file. It works pretty well. Here is the link: XeTeX-HTML (shell script)
• Alternatively, if you use BBEdit, you can use this applescript to convert the .html document you are working on in BBEdit to a .rtf file. It places the resulting .rtf file in the same directory as your html file. I offer my humble thanks to John Delacour for supplying the applescript code to make this possible. Here’s the link: XeTeX-HTML (applescript)

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