[XeTeX] Problems in Arabic typesetting

[John Was]

Dear Jonathan

Ah, I think that's put me on the right track - many thanks.  The paragraphing was meant to be under the influence of an \everypar earlier declared, but as per your advice I produced a new minimal file with the \beginR etc. specifically inserted in order to show the problem - and then the problem disappeared (or almost - see below)!  I obviously haven't picked up the specifics of how the bidi setting works - and should have started with Hebrew really, which I can at least struggle through haltingly - but I suppose I'll be reasonably au fait by the time I've ploughed through the conference proceedings I'm setting.

However, although I've now got correct PDF output, which is all I really care about, intriguingly the Arabic is still back to front in the Babelpad screen display, as per the PDF I sent before.  I'm presuming there is something in the software or other procedure that the author used to prepare his Word file that has caused this (I'm asking him for details), but I can cope with the bizarreness of what I get on the editing screen as long as the output is right.

I'll proceed with caution and try not to waste people's time unless I find myself in dire straits...

Best


John



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jonathan Kew 
  To: Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms 
  Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 8:04 PM
  Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Problems in Arabic typesetting


  Hi John,


  On 20 Feb 2008, at 7:47 pm, John Was wrote:


    Thanks for the response Jonathan

    I think all is in order re TeXXetState=1 and so on.  I should certainly have included the tex source, which is:

    {\newarabic \setbox0=\lastbox \beginR \box0 \noindent \hskip -\parindent
    This is from Giannakis:\par

    ١. قال أبو على~.~.~.  وهو [=أنبادقلس] وأنكساغورس يقولان إن الموجودات واحد وكثير أما  كثير فمن قبل المادة وأما واحد فمن قبل أن*** الفاعل الذي يميزها هو واحد وهو العقل.
    }\par
    \vfill \eject


  In that fragment, at least, I don't see anything making the paragraph of Arabic text right-to-left. You need a \beginR *after* the paragraph has been started (e.g., by \noindent) and before the text.


    Interestingly, that comes out correctly in this pasted-in version though in Babelpad it's showing up with the words in reverse order, exactly as in the PDF.  I am wondering if there is some Word-related direction instruction buried unseen, which messes things up in Babelpad (and in the resultant PDF produced by XeTeX) but is thrown out when I come to paste it into an e-mail.  But that seems rather implausible.


  True, but you could avoid the issue by attaching a (short but complete) sample file rather than pasting fragments into the message.


  JK








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