Am 15.02.2009 um 08:20 schrieb Ilda Khaki:

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TeX engines to decide the best one. Can anyone send a samplwe file for typesetting Arabic in Plain TeX over luatex where the alphabets are not isolated?

1. Mixed-up categories: Plain TeX is a macropackage, luaTeX is an engine.

No. It is not. When someone uses Plain TeX in an engine, he would say Plain TeX over the engine-name. It seems you know very little about Plain TeX.

Your question was not clear enough and it's read as you want to compare TeX (the program) with LuaTeX (the program). You should say Plain TeX in or with LuaTeX.

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4. Without a more precise question I cannot really recommend which way to go from here.

This is a sample file, I am looking for.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% \pagedir TRT \bodydir TRT \textdir TRT \pardir TRT \font\test=zar.ttf scaled\magstep0

هل انت کیقک؟ \end %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

But I do not know how to define the font so that Arabic alphabets are not isolated.

You use in ConTeXt features to enable functions like kerning, ligatures etc. In the higher level interface you do this with "interface=..." but with the font primitive this is done with \font\...=...*featurename and in your example \font\test=zar*arabic scaled\magstep0 \test % you forgot to enable the font Wolfgang

Ilda Khaki wrote:

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1. Mixed-up categories: Plain TeX is a macropackage, luaTeX is an engine.

No. It is not. When someone uses Plain TeX in an engine, he would say Plain TeX over the engine-name. It seems you know very little about Plain TeX.

that's just a side effect of the engines dafaulting to some plain name i.e. tex->plain.fmt, pdftex->pdftex.fmt, luatex->luatex.fmt, etc so, although luatex can use a plain.fmt format, in practice it would be luatex.fmt (now that we have engine subpaths a non-clashing plain.fmt would be posible but that's all dependent of the cnf file) concerning plain itself ... i guess that in most macropackages you can use plain-like macros; it would be interesting to know what functionality plain offers that macro packages don't provide too; the main advantage of plain is that it's small and very stable, but any luatex related font code will make plain way bigger, slower and less stable

This is a sample file, I am looking for.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% \pagedir TRT \bodydir TRT \textdir TRT \pardir TRT \font\test=zar.ttf scaled\magstep0

هل انت کیقک؟ \end %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

But I do not know how to define the font so that Arabic alphabets are not isolated.

it would probably also need something \input a-lot-of-extra-lua-code \font\test=zar.ttf[plus enabling arabic features] scaled\magstep0 and probably more since plain tex is meant as basis for typesetting an english book and not arabic ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------