[XeTeX] bidi.sty for plain XeTeX

[Joseph Wright]

On 21/12/2012 22:24, John Was wrote:
> I'm not an Arabist but have occasionally had to typeset articles in
> plain XeTex using Arabic, and all I have in my file header is:
> 
> \TeXXeTstate=1 % this turns e-TeX's bidi functionality on
> \def\intextarab#1{{\arabic {\beginR #1\endR}}}
> 
> I define \arabic as a call to my Arabic font (the definition of \arabic
> changes according to whether  I'm in main text, footnote text, or
> extract text).  To achieve Arabic I just give \intextarab{ARABIC TEXT
> HERE}. That works fine for bits of Arabic embedded in English (or other
> left-to-right) text in the same paragraph.  For separate Arabic
> paragraphs you really just need
> \beginR
> 
> and at the end
> 
> \endR
> 
> 
> There are no doubt slicker ways of doing things, but that gave me good
> output first time round so I stuck with it!
> 
> 
> John

For an entire document, you need to worry about \everypar and
\parindent, for example

  \TeXXeTstate = 1 %
  \newbox\indentbox
  \everypar{%
    \setbox\indentbox=\lastbox
    \beginR
      \box\indentbox
  }

as \beginR is an hmode command.
-- 
Joseph Wright