[XeTeX] Arabic fonts and line heights

[Juan Acevedo]

Dear Nathan,

The tricky decision is, as you point out: is it preferable to have mixed line heights or to have one large baselineskip for the entire document? In my experience with mixed Arabic and English there is no b/w solution (sadly for the ideal nice and regular grid layout we desire), and a compromise which pleases the eye tends to be the way to go. 

To control the leading locally for entire paragraphs or pages I use the setspace package, which allows you to use the environment spacing with any measure you want.

If I have a mixed paragraph with Arabic scattered here and there, I would usually keep the Arabic in mboxes (something like \mbox{\RL{}} to make sure that the paragraph building introduces the necessary extra leading automatically, thus avoiding manual line breaks.

You may want to make sure that your document has \raggedbottom at the beginning, to prevent TeX's vertical stretching to creep in and mess with your leading.

I hope this helps,
Juan