[XeTeX] bidi.sty for plain XeTeX

[John Was]

Hello

I think the problem is probably the way you call the Arabic font (unless the 
font itself is like a monospaced font with no ligature facililty - but that 
seems unlikely).  If you have Scheherazade, try the following (for use with 
surrounding ten-point type:  typically, for legibility an Arabic font will 
have a larger pointsize than the surrounding roman text):

\font\uarabicten = "Scheherazade:script=arab" at  13pt
\let\arabic\uarabicten

Even if you don't have Scheherazade, this should work provided you remember 
':script=arab' in calling the font, as above.  If it doesn't work, I guess 
you are using a font that doesn't have the appropriate feature installed, 
and that might make it rather difficult to get a satisfactory result. 
Scheherazade seems generally to win approval from those who know about such 
things, though (not me), so it might be worth moving over to that (even as a 
temporary measure to ensure that you get valid output).

Best


John




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "heer" <heer at u.washington.edu>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 22 December 2012 05:46
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] bidi.sty for plain XeTeX


> John,
>
>  Your suggestion worked very well.  Arabic words and letters now read from 
> right to left.  However, the letters all appear as separate letters rather 
> than connected as they should be.  Is there any way to correct that?
>
> Nicholas
>
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2012, 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
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "heer" <heer at u.washington.edu>
>> To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
>> Sent: 21 December 2012 21:52
>> Subject: [XeTeX] bidi.sty for plain XeTeX
>>
>>
>>>
>>>  Is there a bidi.sty file for plain XeTeX or only for XeLateX? I'd like 
>>> to be able to use Arabic script in plain XeTeX.
>>>
>>> Nicholas
>>>
>>>
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