[XeTeX] Arabic Transliteration

[Gareth Hughes]

Hi Mohammad!

Mohammad Gharaibeh wrote:
> thank you for your help, but there are some questions left 
> open. I don´t know how to use the Unicode characters in 
> XeTeX. I already put my editor font encoding on UTF-8.

Firstly, you need to be using a font that has these characters. As
Tilman has already mentioned, Gentium (from http://www.sil.org/) and
Linux Libertine have them.

Secondly, the editor you are using to prepare your document might not
display these characters in its default font. I use gedit which has very
good Unicode support. Which editor are you using?

Thirdly, there are three ways you can get these characters in your
editor. The simplest is to use a character palette/map, which most OSes
have fitted as standard: find the character, copy and paste. Another way
is to use an input method like SCIM or a virtual keyboard set up with
the characters you want (you could play around with Yudit —
http://www.yudit.org/ — it is a text editor with built-in input methods,
or BP's suggestion of BabelMap/Pad might help). The third way is to use
Tilman's method of \char"0351 for ع ʿayn and \char"0357 for ء hamza, but
I find this a bit clunky compared to using a good Unicode text editor.

If you are still having difficulty, it would be very useful to know
which operating system and text editor you are using, because these are
not really XeTeX issues.

Best wishes,

Gareth.

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