[XeTeX] arabic

[Kamal Abdali]

Dear Khaled,

You are absolutely correct that collation is language-dependent. In fact, at
least in Urdu there seems some disagreement about the place of at least two
letters and a vagueness about defining the order for vocalized words (i.e.,
after inserting the short vowels that are generally omitted). But my hope
was that once we have one standard table for a large alphabet and make it
work with some indexing program, we could worry about the ordering
variations.

Kamal Abdali

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 05:32, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 08:47:04PM -0400, Kamal Abdali wrote:
> > HI Houda and Ross,
> >
> > Ross is of the opinion that the job of indexing in Arabic can be done
> with
> > makeindex. I did a little search and reading, and concluded that the job
> is not
> > one that can be done in an afternoon (or two). At least not without some
> hints
> > from Ross (and others).
> >
> > For the xindy route, there are files that accompany the xepersian
> package.
> > Since the Persian alphabet is a superset of the Arabic one, those files
> should
> > suffice without change to create an Arabic index (assuming that they work
> > properly in Persian).  Since the Urdu alphabet is a superset of the
> Persian
> > one, the Persian xindy still needs to be generalized somewhat. Sorry to
> keep
> > inserting Urdu in the discussion, but that concerns me most these days.
> > Moreover, a solution for Urdu should also work for Arabic. As I've never
> used
> > xindy before, the task again seems much more complex than an afternoon's
> > hacking :-).
>
> I think collation rules are language dependant, some letters get
> different sort order in Arabic and Persian, so the files should be
> checked carefully before use in other languages. Some, if not most
> depending on the field, Arabic authors will prefer Abjadi order which is
> totally different from Alphabetical order.
>
> Regards,
>  Khaled
>
> --
>  Khaled Hosny
>  Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
>  Free font developer
>
>
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