[XeTeX] Arabic and line spacing

[Jonathan Kew]

On 3 Jun 2005, at 3:39 pm, Musa Furber wrote:

> The line height between lines of Arabic text always a bit large. Is 
> there any way to reduce this? I have tried 
> \fontsize{point-size}{on-line-size}\selectfont, but it doesn't change 
> anything.
>
> Any ideas?

In plain TeX terms, you need to override \lineskiplimit so as to allow 
the nominal height and depth of adjacent lines to overlap slightly, as 
the ascent and descent metrics of most Arabic fonts are such that 
otherwise you get quite generous spacing.

Not being much of a LaTeX user, I don't know what the appropriate LaTeX 
idiom would be, but I expect one of the experts here can help.

JK