Ah yeah, for things other than the built-in special characters (like umlauts), you also need all the relevant language-specific packages that actually implement the macro, a bit of additional fun. ;-) In the Hebrew case, you need the ivritex package for \hebalef to be defined.
But yeah, XeLaTeX makes that all much simpler. The LaTeX solution is mostly good if you're already using LaTeX for some reason, but need to include non-ASCII text from a limited range of languages (e.g. you're writing a Hebrew document, or an English document with a Greek literature quotation).
But yeah, XeLaTeX makes that all much simpler. The LaTeX solution is mostly good if you're already using LaTeX for some reason, but need to include non-ASCII text from a limited range of languages (e.g. you're writing a Hebrew document, or an English document with a Greek literature quotation).