[XeTeX] Arabtex fonts with XeTeX

[Philipp Reichmuth]

Peter Dyballa schrieb:
>> Is it possible to use the arabic font of ArabTeX with XeTeX ?
> 
> XeTeX can in principle use the PostScript based fonts. The problem is  
> that these fonts are not Unicode encoded, so they can't be used in  
> XeTeX.

And that they're not really fonts with a somehow-1:1 relation of glyphs 
to characters, but rather graphic elements that the ArabTeX engine 
somehow stitches together to form characters.  So I guess they're 
unusable for direct use by XeTeX.  Of course, you can use ArabTeX's 
Arabic environments to produce Arabic output with them, but that is 
possible without XeTeX as well.

On the other hand, there is little reason to still use those fonts with 
XeTeX.  ArabTeX has a few features that XeTeX lacks (e.g. automatic 
lengthening of kasha'id in formatting poetry), but otherweise XeTeX uses 
a much cleaner and more flexible approach.

Philipp