I want to write a LaTeX document in Yiddish

Question

I'm trying to find Yiddish support in LaTeX. There's the Makor2 package, which has an elegant solution, but it depends on Omega and Lambda, which are discontinued. Is there any easy way to write in Yiddish (not Hebrew) using a package contained in the latest TeX Live?

Answer 1

Yiddish is supported by babel. Support is not complete, but you can fill the gaps easily following the indications printed to the log file.

As the main language

Here is a monolingual example with Yiddish as the document language (text from Wikipedia), using lualatex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[bidi=basic, yiddish, provide=*]{babel}
\babelfont{rm}{FreeSerif}
\begin{document}
\section{אינטערנעץ}
מער ווי 10,000 ביכער אויף יידיש, אפשר מער ווי העלפט פון אלע ביכער
פארעפנטלעכט אויף יידיש, זענען אצינד אנליין מיט דער ארבעט פון די יידישער
ביכער-צענטער, וואלונטירן און דער אינטערנעץ ארכיוו.
\end{document}

As a secondary language

Here is an example of a German document with some Yiddish words or sentences (again lualatex, again from Wikipedia):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[bidi=basic, ngerman]{babel}
\babelfont[yiddish]{rm}{FreeSerif}
\begin{document}
\section{Aleph und Ajin}
Entsprechend schreibt man: \foreignlanguage{yiddish}{אַלט} (alt ‚alt‘),
\foreignlanguage{yiddish}{אָװנט} (ownt ‚Abend‘),
\foreignlanguage{yiddish}{אײַז} (ajs ‚Eis‘).
\end{document}