[XeTeX] Arabic prose

[Musa Furber]

On Jul 1, 2005, at 10:54 AM, Bernd wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> has anybody tried to get Arabic prose into shape? I mean classical 
> Arabic prose, split into two parts and block formatted.

I'm not sure what you are talking about here since "classic" is so 
relative.

If you mean the format commonly used when you have longer text in the 
middle with a box around it, and a shorter text printed in the margins, 
I think you will have a difficult time getting LaTeX to do this well; 
memoir's marginnote and sidepar might do it, though. ConTeXt perhaps, 
since it is supposed to have ways to link boxes of text.

If you will settle for the modern version of the above where there is a 
primary text (
"a") above and a commentary below, you can write use custom footnote 
styles where the reference markers are invisible and the footnotes are 
in paragraph format (try the footmisc package or memoir so you can have 
multiple streams of footnotes with independent formatting).

Do you have a specimen you can send? You can email it to me if its less 
than 300kb.

Regards,
Musa