[XeTeX] arabic

Khaled Hosny khaledhosny at eglug.org
Wed Apr 4 16:04:45 CEST 2012


On Wed, Apr 04, 2012 at 02:00:34PM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 2012/4/4 Jean-Louis Cordonnier <jlcord2 at wanadoo.fr>:
> > I want to use arabxetex (or with latex) to learn arabic language.
> > (So I can swith voyels on or off)
> > And I dont know how to type it easily on my french keyboard.
> > I am not convinced by yudit.
> > Another solution ?
> >
> ArabXeTeX is a useful tool, mainly for European users. Typing directly
> in UTF8 brings a few problems:
> 
> 1. The keyboard layout. We Europeans know where e.g. b occurs on the
> keyboard, but do we know where to find ب? There is a phonetic keyboard
> for Urdu but I do not know whether such keyboard is available for
> Arabic.

There is a Buckwalter layout (at least on Debian) that maps Arabic
letter to closest Latin or something like that.

> And one off-topic: yous should accustom to non-vocalized text as soon
> as possible. I do not know Arabic but I lear Urdu and I have never
> read vocalized text. Even words in the Urdu-Hindi dictionary
> (published and printed in India) are not vocalized. I have various
> difficulties when reading Urdu but missing vocalization is not a
> problem at all.

Vowel marks are usually omitted in Arabic too except when there is
ambiguity that can not be easily clarified from context, and even that
the limitations of typewriters and early computing system accustomed
people to always omit it falling to more verbose and less elegant
lingual constructs (people used to criticise my translations
because I used vowel marks rather generously).

Regards,
 Khaled


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