Re: Fwd: Bug#220869: hebrew macros are old; conflict with ivritex

[Baruch Even <baruch@ev-en.org>]

Hi,

* Martin Pitt <martin@piware.de> [031116 06:18]:
> On 2003-11-15 13:26 +0100, Frank K?ster wrote:
> > Martin Pitt <martin@piware.de> schrieb:
> > 
> > > I don't know much about babel and ivritex. It seems that babel should
> > > be updated to include the new lheenc.def to work even without ivritex.
> > >
> > > What do you think about that?
> > 
> > It sounds like a good solution. Anyway, it's a problem that should also
> > be fixed upstream. In order to contact the babel developers and not
> > annoying them, we need a small test file that reproduces the
> > problem. Could you provide that?
> 
> I asked the original submitter, but in the meanwhile I produced one
> myself. I output two alefs, once with the proper char and one with the
> \hebalef command:
> 
[...]
> 
> The accented a is dec 224 and stands for alef in iso-8859-8. This
> works when ivritex is installed, but fails if not. In the latter case
> \hebalef is an unknown command, the current babel defines that as
> \alef (ivritex diverts lheenc.def to provide the new command names).
> 
> I also prepared an unicode version of this example which I will use to
> test my fix to latex-ucs. But before I do that I would like to make
> sure that the \heb-prefixed commands are really the ones that should
> be used from now on and that all packages will become consistent.

Babel commands conflicted with AMS Symbols and so it is more logical to
move the hebrew commands and not the math commands, a user that wants it
can define macros of his own to provide the old commands for
compatibility.

I think that using in babel the same macros as we have in ivritex is the
correct solution.

Baruch

p.s. I'm also bcc-ing Tzafrir Cohen to comment on this, he is the
upstream maintainer for IvriTeX.