Hebrew LaTeX Export in Org-mode

TL;DR

• Writing Hebrew with LaTeX needs lualatex, babel with bidi, and Hebrew-capable fonts.
• A small hebrew.tex preamble handles all the typesetting machinery.
• A custom Org export backend wires the preamble, compiler, language, and author into every Hebrew export without polluting the file itself.
• The result: plain Org files that export to bidirectional Hebrew PDFs with a single command.

Writing Hebrew in LaTeX is not hard, but it requires a few moving pieces to line up: a modern engine, a bidirectional text package, and fonts that actually contain Hebrew glyphs. I wanted to get this working inside Org-mode, without having to sprinkle #+LATEX_HEADER lines at the top of every document. Here is the setup I ended up with.

The LaTeX Preamble

First, the engine. LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX both bring Unicode and OpenType to TeX, but they diverge where it matters for complex scripts: XeLaTeX delegates font discovery to the OS and requires explicit directional markup for RTL text, while LuaLaTeX builds its own font database — seeing both system and TeX-tree fonts by name — and handles bidirectional direction automatically at the engine level. For Hebrew, or any RTL-primary document, that distinction is decisive. With the LaTeX team’s development focus firmly on LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX is increasingly the legacy choice.

With LuaLaTeX settled, babel is the package of choice. The typesetting side lives in a single file, hebrew.tex:

% Template for Hebrew latex
\usepackage[bidi=basic]{babel}
\babelprovide[main,import]{hebrew}
\babelfont[hebrew]{rm}{Heebo}
\babelfont[english]{rm}{Avenir}

A few notes on what this does:

• babel with bidi=basic handles bidirectional text — mixing Hebrew and English in the same paragraph without manual markup.
• \babelprovide[main,import]{hebrew} sets Hebrew as the main language and imports its locale data (date formats, hyphenation, etc.).
• \babelfont picks the font per language: Heebo for Hebrew and Avenir for Latin script. LuaLaTeX picks these up directly from the system font registry — on a Mac, anything installed through Font Book is available by name, no TeX-tree gymnastics required.

That’s the entire preamble. No polyglossia, no bidi package directly, no manual font loading.

The Org Export Backend

The second half is making Org-mode use this preamble automatically. Instead of adding header lines to each file, I define a derived export backend:

;; Hebrew Latex support via custom backend, for inserting the template
(org-export-define-derived-backend 'latex-hebrew 'latex
  :options-alist
  '((:latex-header "LATEX_HEADER" nil "\\input{./hebrew.tex}")
    (:latex-compiler "LATEX_COMPILER" nil "lualatex")
    (:language "LANGUAGE" nil "hebrew" t)
    (:with-drawers nil "d" nil)
    (:with-properties nil "prop" nil)
    (:author "AUTHOR" nil "דניאל פליישר" parse)))

org-export-define-derived-backend creates a new backend, latex-hebrew, that inherits everything from the built-in latex backend and only overrides a handful of defaults:

• :latex-header injects \input{./hebrew.tex} into the preamble, so the Hebrew setup is always loaded.
• :latex-compiler forces lualatex, which is required for the Unicode fonts and bidi machinery.
• :language sets hebrew as the document language.
• :with-drawers and :with-properties strip Org’s internal drawers and property blocks from the output — I don’t want them in a finished document, but change to taste.
• :author defaults the author to my name in Hebrew, while still being overridable from the file.

Because it’s a derived backend, everything else — tables, code blocks, math, cross-references — keeps working exactly as it does for regular LaTeX export.

Using It

The custom backend isn’t meant for exporting directly — it’s there as a source of templates. With point in a buffer (or on a heading), C-c C-e # prompts for a backend and inserts the corresponding #+ keywords, filled in from the :options-alist. Picking latex-hebrew drops in the LATEX_HEADER, LATEX_COMPILER, LANGUAGE, and AUTHOR lines, so the file or subtree is ready to export with the regular LaTeX backend. No per-file boilerplate to remember — just the template, once.

The nice property of this split is that the two sides stay independent. hebrew.tex is a plain LaTeX snippet, reusable from any .tex document; the Elisp backend just points at it. Changing fonts or preamble options is a one-file edit on the LaTeX side, and adding more Hebrew-specific Org behavior is a one-file edit on the Elisp side.