Tabbing in RtoL text (was Re: [XeTeX] Right-indents with Arabic in xelatex)

[Jonathan Kew]

On 7 Feb 2005, at 6:04 pm, Frederick Hoyt wrote:

> Thank you for the suggestion regarding hanging indents.
>
> Could anyone then suggest a solution for using tab spaces with a 
> \beginR environment, so that the tabs proceed to from the left margin 
> rightwards.

Did you mean "from the right margin leftwards", perhaps? That would 
seem more logical.

>  I tried using the \tabbing environment, but it places the tabs (and 
> associated text at the left margin.
>
> The project in question involves typsetting an Arabic text in playbook 
> format:
>
> 	Mary 	:	Blah blah blah.
> 	John		:	Grumble grumble grumble. 	
>
> The text portion requires hanging indentation (hence my previous 
> inquiry), and then the spacing between the character identifiers, the 
> colon, and the text needs to be uniform (hence the tabbing).
>

I'm not sure exactly what your source text looks like for this, but if 
it were my project, I'd probably write a little custom macro to handle 
each "line" (potentially wrapped). Supposing your source contains lines 
of the form:

<speaker> <TAB> <colon> <TAB> <text of the speech, possibly long enough 
to wrap>

with a blank line separating each such line. Then you could do 
something like:

\parindent=1in % or whatever measure you like for the "speaker : " part
\def\doplayline #1^^I:^^I{%
   \hangindent -\parindent \hangafter=1
   \setbox0=\lastbox \beginR \hbox to \parindent{#1\hfil:\kern1em}}
\everypar={\doplayline}

followed by a series of such lines.

I'd expect LaTeX's various tab-related environments and commands to be 
L-R oriented, and to need some adaptation for R-L use; I haven't looked 
into this in any detail, not being much of a LaTeX user.

JK