[XeTeX] Emacs

[Scot Becker]

Emacs users and potential Emacs users might be interested to know that
the development branch of Emacs now has working basic bidi support
which is in need of wider testing.  I can't testify to Arabic, Syriac
or other RTL languages, but I've had good luck with vocalized Hebrew
in the past few days.  It makes typesetting XeLaTeX with Hebrew in
Emacs much nicer.

To try it out you'll need:

1.  The latest development sources of Emacs, including bzr and all the
Emacs prereq's.

In Debian-based Linux distributions, that's available using something like:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep emacs23
$ sudo apt-get bzr
mkdir ~/src/emacs
cd ~/src/emacs

Full instructions for building Emacs are in the INSTALL file:
Mac users see here:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

2.  For Hebrew and Yiddish, you'll want the brand-new input methods
for Hebrew and Yiddish. See the attachment to this message:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bidi/597

 I see that Emacs contains an older Arabic input method, which may
also work.  I don't know.

3.  That's it.  Build Emacs.
To test bidi, evaluate this:
   (setq-default bidi-display-reordering t)

At this point you can start up your bidi XeLaTeX files and hack away.

To load the above mentioned Hebrew input methods:
    M-x load-library  RET  /path/to/abovementioned/hebrew.el
    M-x set-input-method RET hebrewTAB
(to see the choices for Hebrew.  There's a nice set of options, both
for those with Hebrew-keyboard fingers and those who want a phonetic
system.  See the file hebrew.el for details.)

It's a little bit of work to get it up and going, and if you find a
bug it's another bit of work to file a proper report on the GNU bug
tracker, but the developers are responsive, and keen to have bug
reports.  I think it's fair to say that bidi support is fairly'
stable, perhaps even outright usable!

You might find it instructive to read the last few weeks of the
emacs-bidi mailing list, to catch up.
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bidi

You can also send your questions to that list by subscribing here:
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-bidi

Hope this is of interest to someone.

Scot