[XeTeX] arabxetex utf vocalization options

[Juan Acevedo]

Amigos,

 From a sentence in p.5 of arabxetex manual,

" There are also advantages of  choosing an ArabTEX mapping (i.e., one  
of the novoc, voc and fullvoc modes) even with UTF-8 encoding, as it  
provides easy access to special glyphs and some useful features. See  
further below."

I gather it should be possible to modify the Arabic vocalization even  
when the input is directly in UTF8 Arabic. Is this wishful reading? If  
not, I would much appreciate help achieving this. So far, if I say,  
for instance,

\textarab[utf,novoc]{ يُحْيِيْ وَيُمِيْتُ}

compilation stops saying something like "no novoc mapping in utf mode".


Alternatively, in a worst-case scenario, does anyone know or can  
suggest a painless way to convert (lots of) utf Arabic into ArabTeX- 
encoded Arabic?

Many thanks,
Juan