[XeTeX] Arabic prose

[Jonathan Kew]

On 1 Jul 2005, at 4:45 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

>
> On Jul 1, 2005, at 5:23 PM, Bernd wrote:
>
>
>> Sorry, not prose, I meant poetry.
>> I'm trying to make one of Abu Nuwas' poems look like a poem.
>>
>
> Did you one of Peter Wilson's various packages? memoir does itself  
> does verse.
>
> The ArabTeX package includes code for doing poetry; perhaps you  
> could just adapt it for XeLaTeX.
>
> My guess, though, is that you might have some difficulty getting  
> automatic inter-letter stretching so that all lines end up being  
> the same length. Mellel does this. I'm not sure what they use to do  
> it; perhaps the ARABIC TATWEEL or a shorter version of it. Hey,  
> this sounds like a fun macro for someone [else] to write. :-)

This can be done automatically if you're using an AAT font that  
includes a justification table, as some of Apple's do. Try this  
(using some random text I grabbed from a web page)....

% - - - - ArabJustify.tex - - - -
% (process this with plain XeTeX)
\TeXXeTstate=1
\nopagenumbers
\hsize=4in
\font\arab="Al Bayan Plain" at 16pt \arab
\baselineskip=24pt
\parindent=0pt
\parfillskip=0pt
\hbadness=10000
\everypar={\beginR}
\obeylines
أنفاسكِ حوليأنفاسكِ حولي
تفاحةٌ تشبه هواءً أحمر
وأعْبد فيكِ هذا الجزءَ بالتحديد
ذلك المكان الذي تتوحد فيه الكلمات
وذلك المكان الذي لاتعود فيه الكلمات  
للكلام
ذلك المكان الذي تتساقط فيه الإشارات  
والمحسوس يبقى.
قيمةُ ما أنتِ عليه هو هذا
أن لانتكلم أو نتجسَس على اللامرئي
وأن لانتخطى عتبةَ البيت الصغير الذي  
هو جسدانا.

\bye
% - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Enjoy,

JK