[XeTeX] Working with Arabic in xelatex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 Dec 2004, at 10:36 pm, Frederick Hoyt wrote:

> Hi
>
> I am trying out Musa Furber's sample for using Arabic with xelatex:
>
> http://www.tug.org/pipermail/xetex/2004-July/000533.html
>
> I have XeTeX installed via Gerben Wierda's i-Installer, and at the 
> moment am using Texshop as my frontend.
>
> There is a problem in that while the file generates without error 
> messages, the output file is completely blank. The lack of error 
> messages suggests that tex is finding the font(s) ok. Any suggestions?
>

Just a hunch.... could it be that you have TeXShop set to use an 
encoding such as MacRoman or Latin1, rather than Unicode? If so, then 
although the Arabic example looks fine when you paste it into the 
TeXShop editor, when the file is saved it'll be written using an 
encoding that doesn't support Arabic, and the characters are all lost 
(actually, converted to '?'.... which in turn isn't supported by Geeza 
Pro, and so appears blank).

One way to check: If you close and re-open the source file, is the 
Arabic text still intact?

JK