Right-to-left text in LaTeX - reversed numbers and parentheses

Question

Finally I got my Hebrew working on LaTeX.

Everything's working great except for two issues - numbers and parentheses. Numbers are written the other way around (one hundred would be written 001), and parentheses are reversed too )like this(. Is there a solution for the problem?

MWE:

\documentclass[english,hebrew]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
המספר (מאה) בספרות הוא 100
\end{document}

Answer 1

You can use Artyom Beilis' BiDiTex, which pre-processes a (La)TeX file to reverse parentheses and enclose numbers in appropriate macros.

The documentation lists the problem you mention exactly, in section 1... that's the motivation for writing that utility.

Using the question's MWE:

\documentclass[english,hebrew]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{biditex}
%BIDION
\begin{document}
המספר (מאה) בספרות הוא 100
\end{document}
%BIDIOFF 

And running

cat mwe.tex | biditex.exe -o mwe_out.tex

you get:

\documentclass[english,hebrew]{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{biditex}
\begin{document}
המספר )מאה( בספרות הוא \Lnum{100}
\end{document}

Which results when LaTeXing in the output you'd expect:

Of course, you would want to scriptify all of this.

By the way, BiDiTeX seems to require UTF-8 input.

Answer 2

I agree daniel.jackson, Polyglossia and XeTeX are the way to go. Here's my working example, though minimal it is not:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

%polyglossia packages - polyglossia must be first
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\usepackage{bidi}

%XeTeX packages
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
\usepackage{xunicode}

%settings for packages
\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setotherlanguage{hebrew}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}

\begin{document}

Here is a whole phrase or section in left-to-right direction:

\setRL
 הנשיא האמריקאי ברק אובמה נאם הערב (שישי) בוועידת הקהילות היהודיות שנערכה בוושינגטון.
\unsetRL

Or, for when a few words will do:

\RL{\ldots נאם הערב (שישי) בוועידת\ldots}

And it works fine with numbers as well:

\RL{\ldots נאם 100 + 30 = 130 הערב (שישי) בוועידת\ldots}

Even nested environments work just fine:

\RL{\ldots נאם \LR{with English in the middle} הערב (שישי) בוועידת\ldots}

\end{document}