[XeTeX] arabxetex utf vocalization options

[Gareth Hughes]

Juan Acevedo wrote:
> Amigos,

Amigo!

> From a sentence in p.5 of arabxetex manual,
> 
> " There are also advantages of  choosing an ArabTEX mapping (i.e., one
> of the novoc, voc and fullvoc modes) even with UTF-8 encoding, as it
> provides easy access to special glyphs and some useful features. See
> further below."
> 
> I gather it should be possible to modify the Arabic vocalization even
> when the input is directly in UTF8 Arabic. Is this wishful reading? If
> not, I would much appreciate help achieving this. So far, if I say, for
> instance,
> 
> \textarab[utf,novoc]{ يُحْيِيْ وَيُمِيْتُ}
> 
> compilation stops saying something like "no novoc mapping in utf mode".

This would be greatly desirable. After all, one point of XeTeX is that
we shouldn't have to use mappings. All non-ASCII-able writing systems
are easier to read in their own orthography rather than through a
mapping. Arabic is far easier to read in Arabic script than in
transliteration, just as 'café' is easier to read than 'caf\'e', but
even more so. It is often necessary to provide transliterations for
those who cannot read the script, but it's far easier to type the Arabic
than to type the transliteration.

> Alternatively, in a worst-case scenario, does anyone know or can suggest
> a painless way to convert (lots of) utf Arabic into ArabTeX-encoded Arabic?

I'm sure it would be possible to write a preprocessor to handle this,
but having ArabXeTeX do it is preferable by far.

> Many thanks,
> Juan

Thanks for raising this.

Gareth.

-- 
Gareth Hughes

Department of Eastern Christianity
Oriental Institute
Pusey Lane
Oxford
OX1 2LE

+44 (0)1865 610227