Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:08:33 -0700, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

...

Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many are using it. I've seen some

Your message died off, but feel free to ask me any questions u have about Aleph, which I use quite extensively, and without which I would be lost-)

(Scary! I thought I saved the message under drafts - I have no idea how I managed to send it without even noticing that.) Thanks for your kind reply. I mainly wanted to ask if someone could have written something about Aleph to the wiki. There is hardly any info about it on internet except the Hans's manual. There's a mailing list, which is hardly active and there are a couple of one-sentence descriptions spread over different tex-related sites. So the wiki might be a good place for "Aleph homepage". I was wondering about the current state of development (which you mostly described in this mail) - ie. that there is some effort to include the functionality in pdfTeX, that it's stable and currently not developed that fast. It would be nice to mention how to manipulate fonts with many glyphs and how to use them. For example, there's a font Arial Unicode on every PC with Office with over 50.000 glyphs. Since we (PC users) are not able to use XeTeX, it would be fine to have an example of how to use this font under windows and perhaps an example of how to typeset arabic, hebrew or some other (right-to-left) language. How can symbolic fonts be used there? Patrick has enough to do, I'm sure, but perhaps there could be some collaboration with Hraban (and you?) to enable also some more fancy fonts and languages to be used on the garden. I think that Patrick already put some effort into enabling Chinese to work (I'm not sure about it). Currently there are also many .tfm for common fonts missing. If Aleph could work there as well and if some additional fonts would be installed, this would be fantastic. Thanks again, Mojca

Giuseppe is the main developer and we owe him a great debt of gratitude for stabilizing it to the point where it can be used for reliable bidirectional production purposes using large fonts. Personally, I really cannot thank him enough-)

Hans & Co. are pursuing getting all of Aleph's useful features into pdftex, so maybe the the two projects will merge after Giuseppe gets some time.

this would be more than wonderful!

Useful aleph features + opentype support in pdfTeX will open a new vista where the encoding file mess can be thrown away and even virtual fonts will no longer be needed.

One challenge will be replacing the otp filter mechanism with something more user-friendly. I am a bit worried that this will be more difficult than expected, but we'll see.

Best Idris

Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

Hi Mojca,

Here is a place to start ():

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html

Thank you. The next thing that I found was http://omega.enstb.org/papers/. I forgot about looking for papers for Omega.

And please send queries to the aleph list as well. Yes, the traffic is low, but it heats up every now and then-)

OK.

Best Idris

PS I have a lot of sample files for rl-lr typesetting floating around the aleph and old omega lists. Your system should have the omega support files (mostly fonts and ocp's), which I do not think come with XeMTeX, though the last fpTeX version should have them.

I didn't try it yet, but MikTeX has ocp files in the tree. Thanks again, Mojca

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 14:21:39 -0700, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

...

Hi Mojca,

Here is a place to start ():

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html

After some experimenting I managed to get your example on http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega/gamma/README to kind-of-work.

I get those strange arabic and whatever-strange-script-glyphs, but just a short question: how to typeset in utf-8?

The point is that you have to set up the otp filters to use the utf-8 filter instead of the transcription filter. See below... If you already have the regular omega support files in MiKTeX etc, then great. Otherwise: Here is a set of instructions for ConTeXt users: 1. Get the omega support files: http://www.ctan.org/get?fn=/systems/win32/fptex/0.7/package/omega.zip http://www.ctan.org/get?fn=/systems/win32/fptex/0.7/package/omegafonts.zip 2. Get rid of the following directories from omega.zip (not really necessary but if u want to be efficient): texmf/eomega texmf/omega/encodings 3. Put files in texmf-local; 4. Compile the Aleph format: mktexlsr texexec --make en -tex=aleph 5. Always start aleph files with this preamble: % tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx Now test: texexec the following file (in utf-8). I have included a modified version of the one u already have for xtra practice-) Study \def\ArabicUTF: it uses raw omega/aleph commands, but see also m-gamma.tex (in the ConTeXt distro) for some higher-level commands \definefiltersynonym \definefiltersequence \usefiltersequence Have fun! Best Idris ========================================================== % tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx \hoffset=0pt \def\ArabicUTF{\ocp\UTFArUni=inutf8 %% in88596 %\ocp\UTFArUni=in88596 \ocp\UniCUni=uni2cuni \ocp\CUniArab=cuni2oar % ocp's used \ocplist\UTFArOCP= \addbeforeocplist 1 \UTFArUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \UniCUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \CUniArab \nullocplist % ocp list \pushocplist\UTFArOCP} % apply this filter sequence \input m-gamma.tex \input type-omg.tex \switchtobodyfont[omarb,12pt] % \textdir TRT% \pardir TRT% \ArabicUTF \starttext ، ۪ ؛ ؟ ء آ أ ؤ إ ئ ا ب ة ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ـ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ى ي ً ٌ ٍ َ ُ ِ ّ ْ ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ٪ ٫ ٬ ٰ ٱ پ چ ژ ڤ گ ھ ۀ ہ ۃ ې ے ۓ ۔ ە ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹ % ا ب ج د ه و ز \stoptext ================================================================= Here's another file, similar to the one you started with: ================================================================= % tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx \input m-gamma.tex \input type-omg.tex \def\ArabicUTF{\ocp\UTFArUni=inutf8 %% in88596 %\ocp\UTFArUni=in88596 \ocp\UniCUni=uni2cuni \ocp\CUniArab=cuni2oar \ocplist\UTFArOCP= \addbeforeocplist 1 \UTFArUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \UniCUni \addbeforeocplist 1 \CUniArab \nullocplist \pushocplist\UTFArOCP} \setupbodyfont[omlgc,12pt] \showframe[text] \starttext% \start \ArabicUTF\switchtobodyfont[omarb]% \textdir TRT\pardir TRT بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الله اكبر من أن يوصف \stop \textbullet\ This is a test coffin {\tfb \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\tfc \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\tfd \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\tfx \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\tfxx \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\bf \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} {\bfc \textbullet\ This is a test coffin} \startgreek \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d {\tfc \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d} {\bf \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d} {\bfc \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d} \stopgreek \startarab `rby: \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh {\tfc \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh} {\bf \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh} {\bfc \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh} fArsy: {\tfc \textbullet\ A b p t th j ch H kh} \starturdu ArdU: {\tfc \textbullet\ A b p t 't th j ch H kh} \stopurdu `rby: bsm ALLah Al-rrHmn Al-rrHym fArsy: bh nAm khdAwnd b-kh-sh-nde mhrbAn \starturdu ArdU: ALLah kE nAm sE jw rHmAn w rHym hE \stopurdu \stoparab \stoptext ================================================================= -- 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/