[XeTeX] Greek XeLaTeX

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 02:49:42PM -0400, Steve Peter wrote:
> 
> On Oct 12, 2010, at 2:24 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 07:54:26PM +0200, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> >> 	Personally, whether it is called \section, \abschnitt, or \ghaefjkh123 does not matter, as long as I can learn
> >> 	which command name to use for getting a section.
> > 
> > So \قسم, \अनुभाग, \אָפּטיילונג are fine, too?
> 
> Or rather قسم\ and אָפּטיילונג\ ?

Don't trust your eyes :)

I wrote the backslash at the start of the word so it should have be
rendered on the right side, but since \ is a weak bidirectional
characters, it inherits its directionality from the surrounding text and
here it is on the beginning of a RTL embedded run (the Arabic word) in
the middle of LTR line so it gets a LTR directionality and is rendered
on the left side, so it looks wrong though it is correct. So (depending
on your mail reader) this should be right aligned with the slash on the
right, though it is essentially the same key sequence I typed earlier:

\قسم{شيء ما}

Unicode bidirectional algorithm is a bit suboptimal when rendering
embedded sentences that involve characters with weak directionality at
the margin; one has to use explicit bidi marks to clarify the
directionality, e.g. ‫\قسم‬ vs \قسم, both are the same but
the first is enclosed between a right to left embedding and pop
bidirectional formating marks.

But more naturally it should use a slash not a backslash:

/قسم{شيء ما}

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer