[XeTeX] Problems in Arabic typesetting

[John Was]

Thanks for the response Jonathan

I think all is in order re TeXXetState=1 and so on.  I should certainly have included the tex source, which is:

{\newarabic \setbox0=\lastbox \beginR \box0 \noindent \hskip -\parindent
This is from Giannakis:\par

١. قال أبو على~.~.~.  وهو [=أنبادقلس] وأنكساغورس يقولان إن الموجودات واحد وكثير أما  كثير فمن قبل المادة وأما واحد فمن قبل أن*** الفاعل الذي يميزها هو واحد وهو العقل.
}\par
\vfill \eject

Interestingly, that comes out correctly in this pasted-in version though in Babelpad it's showing up with the words in reverse order, exactly as in the PDF.  I am wondering if there is some Word-related direction instruction buried unseen, which messes things up in Babelpad (and in the resultant PDF produced by XeTeX) but is thrown out when I come to paste it into an e-mail.  But that seems rather implausible.

Incidentally the above gobbet is immediately followed (in an experimental file), by:

1.1.4 علم الالفاظ

1.1.4.1 مفرد اي نفس اللفظ دون المعنا

1.1.4.2 ومشترك اي معرفة الالفاظ والمعاني معا كتركيب الكلام المنظوم والمنثور

1.1.4.2.1 شعر اي كلام موزن مقفا لا شيء من الكلام احسن في الاسماء منه ولا كلاما ابقا على مر الايام منه ولا شيء اسهل حفظا منه لرتباط بعضهي ببعض،

1.1.4.2.2 خطب اي كلام منظوم غير موزون ولامقفا يشافه بهي في المحال،


etc. etc.


That typesets correctly (though I want to tinker with the position of the decimal-numbered paragraph starts - but that's a separate issue).

So I'm rather stumped.  I'll keep tinkering though!

Best wishes


John




  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jonathan Kew 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 4:59 PM
  Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Problems in Arabic typesetting




  On 20 Feb 2008, at 4:21 pm, John Was wrote:


    Hello



    The following shows up correctly in Microsoft Word in a file that was sent to me, and seems to be correct in this email.  But when I try to typeset it in XeTeX by pasting it into a UFT-8 file (using Babelpad as my editor) the words are all transposed - see the attached PDF for the result. 

    ١. قال أبو على~.~.~.  وهو [=أنبادقلس] وأنكساغورس يقولان إن الموجودات واحد وكثير أما كثير فمن قبل المادة وأما واحد فمن قبل أن*** الفاعل الذي يميزها هو واحد وهو العقل

    I'm not an Arabist so it's not clear to me what could be going wrong.  To make quite sure that I was not introducing any error in setting up my \arabic command I pasted this quotation into a section of Arabic that I had previously typeset correctly, and everything comes out properly except this new bit of text.

      It may simply be that there is some trick in the saving or copying/pasting that I haven't picked up. Any help much appreciated





  You didn't include your .tex source, so it's hard to be sure, but my guess is that you're lacking a \beginR directive before the Arabic text. That's necessary to get right-to-left line layout.


  (And remember to set \TeXXeTstate=1 at the beginning of the file, otherwise \beginR will not be allowed.)


  JK






------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  XeTeX mailing list
  postmaster at tug.org
  http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://tug.org/pipermail/xetex/attachments/20080220/0981c9d7/attachment-0001.html