Okay, I finally got arabic sort of working in latex, but the debian
packages don't seem to be in such great shape yet. First of all, it was
looking for Arabicore.sty, when in fact I have arabicore.sty (a legacy
from non-case-sensitive OSes...?); and I'm getting a conflict between
arabi and arabtex, so at the moment I only have arabi installed.
Anyhow, at least I can try some of these things out now, see below...
Uwe Stöhr wrote:
Dov Feldstern schrieb:
Uwe, what are you basing this claim on?
> And how do you know that it
> doesn't really work?
Test out the small TeX-file in
http://bugzilla.lyx.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2928#c9
When you use Hebrew additionally it works.
The file as it is doesn't compile. I believe the babel line should read:
\usepackage[english,arabic]{babel}
Then it works (with the beginR, endR stuff). But no need to define
hebrew anywhere...
I also looked at the source code of babel and the command \R is only
defined when Hebrew is used.
(I reported this also to the babel maintainer.)
The LaTeX companion also only mention \R for Hebrew.
The package arabi that is used for Farsi and Arabic states that one has
to use \AR and \FR, so I'm absolutely sure that I'm correct.
Regarding the \R vs. \AR --- I believe that is Arabi-specific. It
certainly makes sense to have the different \AR, \FR, and there should
be \HR, too. But AFAIU, babel defines just plain \R. Most of what I know
about this is from Mostafa's explanations...
The example file certainly won't work, because it's not in real arabic
(attachment 1308)...
But its language is set to Arabic so what do you mean?
Well, the encoding of the letters is not really correct, but I see that
it is generating something (gibberish, but that's something), so I guess
it handles different encodings. The standard encoding that I know of is
cp1256 for Arabic, and that's what LyX writes when you type in Arabic
through the GUI, using the arabic keymap. This seems to be working fine,
BTW: I can type real Arabic in the GUI, and it outputs correctly to the DVI.
I'm trying this out right now (with real arabic), and my main problem
ATM is with loading the appropriate fonts.
Follow this guideline:
http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/Arabic
(ignore MiKTeX)
Yeah, as I said, I had some debian-specific problems here...
Also, the line "\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}" in the generated latex file
seems a little suspect to me, but I'm not sure.
You are right, the correct call according to the documentation of the
arabi package is
\usepackage[LAE,LFE]{fontenc}
and when also other languages than Arabic and Farsi are used it is
\usepackage[T1,LAE,LFE]{fontenc}
I think you're right, but it doesn't seem to be making a difference
either way...
Do you know of anyone who used to be able to use arabic in LyX, but
can't anymore?
The problem is that Arabic could never be used due to this bug and the
now fixed bug 2927.
regards Uwe
Anyhow, to sum this up: before going and fixing LyX, we need to make
sure we know exactly how the underlying latex packages work, and the
impression that I'm getting is that we're not totally clear about that
yet --- I certainly don't really understand this...
I really wish we had people who really use Arabic and latex, who could
tell us which packages are usually used, whether they ever mix
languages, etc. We're just playing around, but we don't know how things
are really done...
Dov
