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I went through multiple guides and explanations until I finally managed to compile documents with mixed English and Hebrew. However, because of the multitude of methods I saw, I am now unsure whether what I did is the best way to go about it, and would like to know of any potential pitfalls I may encounter in the future because of this.

What I had: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with some installation of TexLive (I'm not sure exactly what it included).

What I did: Installed the Culmus package. Installed install-tl-ubuntu and ran sudo ./install-tl-ubuntu --hebrew (thanks Scott!).

After this I am able to compile documents like this, for example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,hebrew]{babel}

\begin{document}

\selectlanguage{english}
Hello World

\selectlanguage{hebrew}
שלום עולם

\selectlanguage{english}
Usually I write in English.

\begin{otherlanguage}{hebrew}
אבל לפעמים אני חייב לכתוב בעברית.
\end{otherlanguage}

But I'm not sure how.

\end{document}

This doesn't work with utf8 instead of utf8x.

Is this a proper way to write mixed-language documents? Is it dated? What problems or limitations might I face if I keep working like this, and how could I avoid them?

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buzjwa
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  • The document code looks fine, the installed packages sound correct. As it works for you, I'd say "yes". If English is your main language, you should load that option at last. This is just a code review and not a real question with any research background. I will vote to close as too broad. – LaRiFaRi May 07 '15 at 10:47
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    For babel is clearest to write main=english. – Andrew Swann May 07 '15 at 11:22
  • For pdflatex the document is fine, but the "modern" way is to use one of the unicode engines xelatex or lualatex (but the state of bidi is not quite clear in the second). To be able to use [utf8] instead of [utf8x] someone would have to write an h8enc.dfu -- not really difficult but time consuming as one would have to check the encoding and the definitions. – Ulrike Fischer May 07 '15 at 12:30

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