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The biggest problem for incorporatingHebrew language text into theEnglish languageWikipedia is that Hebrew flows right-to-left while English flows left-to-right. Worse, thenumerals shared by the two languages don't have as strong directionality as the letters, sometimes causing seemingly inexplicable glitches, as in these example taken from the article onEhud Olmert:
This can be fixed by using theUnicode left-to-right mark (LRM) U+200E at the end of the Hebrew text to signal that the following English text should be read left to right.
The LRM can be placed using an HTML character entity of either the hexadecimal or the decimal value:‎ or‎ or‎. But typing these in can be very tricky: if you position the input marker just at the end of the Hebrew text – i.e., just to the left of the leftmost Hebrew character – the first non-Hebrew character you type may jump around to the right of the Hebrew even as you type the wikitext, possibly carrying more of the text with it.
In some cases it might be possible to just rephrase or move the text around so that the more strongly directioned text follows the Hebrew text. This avoids the need of the LRM altogether.
Another problem is the inconsistency intransliterating Hebrew to theRoman alphabet. The standardISO 259 of 1984 (updated in 1994) addresses this problem by giving a one-to-one correspondence for each Hebrew letter to a Roman letter (though two options are given for ח and ש). There exists a large volume of older English literature that transliterates Hebrew differently but might be otherwise acceptable sources for Wikipedia articles on Jewish topics.Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew) has a chart with four different transliteration systems.
One suggestion is to give the word written in Hebrew the first time it appears in an article, followed immediately by one romanization, then using that romanization consistently through the rest of the article.
ForWindows you can get ArialUnicode MS bundled intoMicrosoft Office. FormacOS, the Hebrew fonts are either in /Library/Fonts or /System/Library/Fonts of the installer disc. ForLinux, linux.com[1] provides free fonts and technical advice for keyboard mapping under X Window.
Windows XP Service Pack 1 had problems withniqqud. SeeWikipedia:Niqqud.