On Thu, 13 May 2010 15:06:09 -0500, Khaled Hosny
Something I find very annoying is variable interline spacing, if I've, for example, a line with some Arabic words vocalized I get some times too much white space above it that it almost looks like an empty line. It makes the page look like crap. Is there a way to force fixed interline spacing?
Can you give an example?
turn turn grid on .. but even then, we need some nice heuristic for determing the right ht/dp ratio for arabic (can be set up)
I have some nice texts that illustrate a standard balance, but I'd like to see what Khaled has in mind exactly before I comment further... Nothing special, I always expect interline space to be fixed, I don't know if TeX always make interline spacing variable, but this wasn't an issue with English text. However, with Arabic, Tashkil marks seems to always cause a noticeable extra whitespace above the line. See the uneven distribution of vertical whitespace in this example (it can be even worse than this in reality): \usemodule[simplefonts] \setmainfont[Arabic Typesetting][features=arabic] \starttext \pardir TRT\textdir TRT \dorecurse{10}{\dorecurse{20}{نص عربي } نَصُّ مُشكَّل \dorecurse{20}{نص عربي}} \stoptext
I used to find this annoying years ago but today I look at it as a good feature. In your \definebodyfontenvironment you just have to define a good interlinespace. Presumably the one picked up from the font by luatex is not high enough. In my journal, I used to use \struttedbox's (or something similarly named) to suppress this when mixing english and arabic... Professionally mixed latin-arabic texts often adjust the interline spacing, especially when arabic is introduced into latin paragraphs. This is almost unavoidable since making arabic-script readable and matchable to latin involves a larger relative size for aesthetic optics. Sometimes forcing will look nice, but even then one probably has to add a bit of interlinespace to the latin font to get the right balance. That is, a latin document that uses a LOT of interparagraph arabic will want a bit extra interlinespace to begin with, so that "forcing" will generally give good results. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Shi`i Studies Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523