[XeTeX] Arabic in XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 28 Jun 2007, at 2:33 pm, John Was wrote:

> I'm no Arabist but was asked to set a short passage from supplied  
> Unicode input (which I think is correct:  it shows up properly in  
> the ugly but essentially reliable Arial Unicode), and I find that  
> the resultant output has the letters given in their individual  
> forms instead of changing depending on context.  So I presume I  
> have to do more than simply select a font that contains Unicode  
> Arabic:  can anyone advise on what the correct procedure is?  Do I  
> have to give some sort of option (introduced by a colon) after the  
> fontname?  I get the same result whether I use Times New Roman or  
> Scheherazade OpenType (the Windows TTF version) - and also,  
> interestingly, when I use Arial Unicode, though it shows up  
> correctly in that font in BabelPad.
>

To use an OpenType Arabic font, you need to activate the Arabic  
shaping engine. In raw xetex, you'd say something like

   \font\x = "Scheherazade:script=arab" at 14pt  .......

and in xelatex with fontspec, you'd use

   \setmainfont[Script=Arabic]{Scheherazade}

(or similar options with \newfontfamily, etc.)

HTH,

JK


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