[XeTeX] various problems with ArabXeTeX

[Benjamin Geer]

2008/11/25 Ross Moore <ross at ics.mq.edu.au>:
>> Thanks, that helps.  But it's surprising to have to do that.  I
>> thought the idea of LaTeX was to make everything look beautiful by
>> default...
>
> Well, the problem is that  "Scale=1.75"  attribute that you have set
> when specifying your font.
>
> Normally the \baselineskip is 12pt for a 10pt font and you
> are using ~17.5pt without having adjusted the lineskip.
> TeX cannot know, when you specify the font, how the lineskip
> should change to accommodate what you want to use it for.

OK, but I only set "Scale=1.75" because the default setting produces
extremely tiny Arabic text; you'd almost need a magnifying glass to
read it.  In contrast, the default font size for a LaTeX article in
English is perfectly readable.  So I can only reiterate my surprise: I
thought that LaTeX was supposed to make everything look beautiful by
default.  Moreover, if LaTeX's built-in typesetting wisdom doesn't
know what line spacing to use for a given font size, I don't see how
I'm supposed to know any better.  Again, I thought that the purpose of
LaTeX was to make it unnecessary to think about such things.

Ben