[XeTeX] ArabXeTeX pre-release

[François Charette]

Dear all,

It has been quite a while since I first announced my intention of 
creating an ArabTeX-like interface for typesetting languages in the 
Arabic script with XeTeX by means of TECkit mappings (last July I 
guess). Now after many interruptions due to various academic 
obligations, I am finally in a position to release an alpha version of 
my ArabXeTeX package.

ABSTRACT
“This package provides a convenient ArabTeX-like user-interface for 
typesetting
languages using the Arabic script in XeLaTeX, with flexible access to font
features. Input in ArabTeX notation can be set in three different 
vocalization
modes or in roman transliteration. Direct UTF-8 input is also supported.
Since most of the ‘real work’ -- namely parsing and converting ArabTeX 
input to
Unicode is done at the level of TECkit mappings, ArabXeTeX is really 
performant.”

Languages supported at present are the same as in ArabTeX, namely: 
Arabic, Maghribi Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, 
Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish, Jawi (Malay) and Uighur. ArabXeTeX adds 
support for several additional Unicode characters, so that some more 
languages are probably supporteSindhid de-facto as well (such as Western 
Punjabi). Transliteration mappings are currently available for Arabic, 
Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Sindhi.

There are many many issues I have been facing during development of this 
package which I would like to address on this list, but for the moment I 
will simply invite all interested XeTeX users to download the package, 
read the (still incomplete) PDF documentation, and perhaps play around 
with all this. I would very much appreciate your critical comments 
before uploading this to CTAN. My plan is to have a beta version next 
week, and an official release in 2-3 weeks, إن شاء الله.

The package can be downloaded from http://ankabut.net/xetex/arabxetex.zip
The documentation (included in the zip file) is also available 
separately: http://ankabut.net/xetex/arabxetex-doc.pdf

Thanks in advance,

سلامات

François Charette
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