[XeTeX] Unicode Arabic inside English with XeTeX

[Manuel Souto Pico]

Hi,

I dare sending this question to the list, although I'm not stuck anymore,
because I thought someone might find it useful one day (it took me a while
to get this done, mysefl).

I paste my document at the end of the mail. The relevant line is:

\newcommand{\ar}[1]{\font\ar="Scheherazade-AAT" at 12 pt {\ar#1}\normalfont}

This is something that allows me to print Arabic text like \ar{سلام عليكم}
within Roman text.

Before I had:

\font\ar="Scheherazade-AAT" at 12 pt

and then I got the Arabic text typing {\ar سلام عليكم} instead.

I changed the latter for the former just because I prefer the syntax \ar{}
rather than {\ar }.

I'm already happy with this result (that I achieved on my own! ;) but still
I'd like to ask: Is any of the two better than the other one? Is this the
normal way to get Arabic text in Roman-scripted documents?

I've seen other ways in other examples (from the XeTeX manual, the
scripts.sil.org XeTeX page and in this list's archives) but I could make
work none of them.

I'm also a bit puzzle that I didn't find any explicit tutorial showing what
to do for this particular case. Are most people still using ArabTex?

Any comments? Thank you!

Cheers, Manuel

PS: Here's my code:

%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}% provides font selecting commands
\usepackage{xunicode}% provides unicode character macros
\usepackage{xltxtra} % provides some fixes/extras
\setromanfont{Palatino}
\newcommand{\ar}[1]{\font\ar="Scheherazade-AAT" at 12 pt {\ar#1}\normalfont}

\begin{document}
This is text in Arabic: \ar{سلام عليكم} in the middle of English text.
\end{document}
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20070311/309079dc/attachment.html