Uwe Stöhr wrote:
Concerning the page: I would not mention the bind file because this is unnecessary. New users will be scared about every preferences fiddling. We don't use special bind files for the other languages, and when the user is experianced enough, he can create any time later its own bind file. If you find this really important, set it at the end on the wiki page under the heading "Tips".
How do you expect a user to type an English--Arabic document using these instructions, without a key binding? You don't even mention the "language" command anywhere, and without that there's no way that it can work... And I don't expect a user to do "Alt-X language arabic_arabtex" every time he wants to switch back and forth between Arabic and English. So using a binding is the only reasonable way to type mixed documents. And I think that being able to mix Arabic with English is a pretty basic requirement...
BTW, in Hebrew we do use the key bindings. The fact that it's not included by default with LyX is unfortunate; but I doubt that you'll find any Hebrew-writing LyX user that doesn't know that F12 switches between English and Hebrew.
The fact is, LyX's support for multiple languages currently leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of initial setup. IMHO, there is no real way at the moment to spare this setup from the user, because there's no point at which the user can say "I'm interested in languages X, Y and Z", so the bindings can't be set up appropriately.
I think that what should be done (long term) is to have some mechanism which allows the user to choose (from a selection list) which languages he wants in the current document (and to be able to setup a default list, so that he doesn't have to do this for every document). Then, there should be an lfun (bound to F12, for example), which cycles between all the languages the user selected. Also, the keymaps should be associated with each language in the lib/languages file, so there won't be any need for user-specific setup of that, either.
But in the meantime, I don't think you can really get a user up and running with multi-lingual LyX --- certainly not if one of the languages is Arabic or Hebrew --- without some initial setup.
> As far as I can tell, Arabi support in LyX does not fully work yet. For me it works much better than than arabtex.
Not for me. I am absolutely unable to generate clean latex directly from LyX. If I just open a new document, switch its language to Arabic(arabi), and start typing, I get the following error when generating latex:
"Package babel Error: You haven't specified a language option." The LyX file and the generated latex are attached. (1) Does the latex file work for you? (2) Does the LyX file work for you? Is the generated latex the same as mine?(3) If you follow the same procedure, do you get a LyX file which looks different than mine?
> You can do most of the work in LyX, and export the file to latex, but then there is some editing > that needs to be done to the generated latex file in order for it to be legal latex:>> * latex preamble: instead of "\documentclass[arabic,english]{article}", should be just> "documentclass{article}"This is correct. You only get Arabic AND english when you have both languages in your document.
You're not paying attention to what I wrote: I don't want either of them; even just the [arabic] is superfluous here. There shouldn't be *anything*.
> * latex preamble: instead of "\usepackage{babel}", should be
> "\usepackage[arabic,english]{babel}"
This is already the case. We load the babel languages in the class options.
Again, not for me it isn't. Right now, I believe, the languages are being inserted in the documentclass command, not in the \usepackage{babel} command; and for me that's not working, maybe its an issue of the arabi version, but it's not working.
> * latex preamble: according to the documentation,
"\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}" should be
> something like "\usepackage[LAE,T1]{fontenc}", but I don't see that
this has any effect either
> way.
But you already get
\usepackage[T1,LFE,LAE]{fontenc}
when using arabic_arabi.
If the document language is "Arabic(arabi)", then it's fine. But if the document language is English, then it doesn't get inserted automatically. But again, this is not crucial right now, as it works either way.
> * In Tools -> Preferences... -> Look and feel -> Keyboard, make sure that "Use keyboard map" is > checked, and then type in @@null@@ as "first", and @@arabic@@ as "second".Why not using Arabic directly as the first keyboard map?
Does it work for you that way? It doesn't work for me...I think that the keymap support is just not built for that kind of thing. Again, the correct way to do this IMO is to associate a language with a keymap. Then there won't be any need for defining "first" or "second" at all. But in the meantime, this is the way to do it. If setting arabic as your "first" keymap works for you, and you are still able to type in another language as well, then I guess you can do it that way.
regards Uwe
Dov
arabi.lyx
Description: application/lyx
arabi.tex
Description: TeX document
