Hi Duncan,
On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 02:30:15 -0600, Duncan Hothersall
Using the fantastic resources from Idris' messages on this list, and the Aleph page on the Wiki, I have managed to start producing Arabic PDF output directly from UTF-8 sources using Aleph and dvipdfmx. This is great, thanks so much.
Glad you liked it:-)
I have just one or two queries and things I wasn't able to make work. I hope someone can help.
My test file is here: http://www.capdm.com/public/context/omarab-queries1.tex And the output it generates is here: http://www.capdm.com/public/context/omarab-queries1.pdf
First question - how do I get italic text? The first three paragraphs in the test are identical content, but the second has {\it ...} around it and the third has {\bf ...} around it. The third para comes out perfectly in bold, but the second para looks the same as the first. How can I get italics?
There is no italic font, only regular and bold, so \it just maps to the default regular font.
Second question - that same first para contains 5 ligatures. They don't seem to match the rest of the font. Is this a set-up issue, or is it the way the font is designed? If it is a set-up issue, is there a way to fix it?
Both :-) You could edit the cuni2oar otp (and recompile it) so that it ignores the ligatures you don't like, or you could put a kashidah between the two letters whose ligature you want to break. Better is to define an "empty" kashidah so that you can manually break the ligature without stretching the word. I'll look into this in the next few days (busy right now) if you remind me-)
Third and final question - I inserted a section and two subsections to demonstrate that the numbering of subsections is left-to-right. How can I make it right-to-left? (Explanation: the PDF shows section "1", and then subsections "1-1" and "1-2"; reading the numbers from right-to-left, I need it to show as section "1" and then subsections "1-1" and "2-1". In the subsection the "1" should come first when reading rtl.)
Add \reversesectionnumberstrue to your Arabic definition: \def\ArabicUTF{\ArabicDirGlobal\usefiltersequence[UTFArabic] \reversesectionnumberstrue\switchtobodyfont[omarb]} Ideally when one selects global RL this should happen automatically. This is being planned for the future :-) Best Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/