Hi JR, On Fri, 23 Aug 2013 15:12:54 -0600, J. R. Schmid <j...@weitnahbei.de> wrote:
for better or worse, I'm trying to typeset Arabic poetry in ConTeXt
For better :-)
after having become fed up with LaTeX for a variety of reasons. Arabic script itself is not a problem and I already love how easy it is to use whatever font you like and how clean ConTeXt seems to be in its design.What is giving me trouble, though, is the face that traditionally, poetry needs to be typeset in two columns. Using an English poem for an example, it'd look a little bit like this:Said Rich Accetta-Evans: 1 My poem delights me 2 My poem is mine 3 It is like fresh bread 4 When I bake it myself 5 It is like my son 6 The day he was born [...]This is to be read in the order of the numbers, so "columns" or "simplecolumns" won't work (I think).
I have an experimental/rudimentary module that does this. It needs some work to get, e.g., better widths for automatic typesetting in the high-level code (tracking the dynamic \hsize in ConTeXt) but you are welcome to try it. See the attached module and test file.
The second problem is the way in which Arabic needs to be justified, namely not by adjusting the space between words, but instead by adjusting the connecting line between letters:قال أبو الطيب أحمد بن الحسين المتنبّي أنـا الـذي نـظر الأعمى إلـى أدبي وأسمعـت كـلماتــي مـن به صمم كم تـطلبون لـنا عيبًـا فــيعجزكم ويكره المجد ما تأتـون والكرم ما أبعـد العيب والنقصان عن شرفي أنا الثّريا وذان الشيب والهرم [...]I couldn't find any info on either of these two questions through the documentation or through Google (although I might have been looking for the wrong keywords). Any comments are appreciated! :-)
I'm hoping that this will be implemented in the coming months. Hans and I have done work on the general case -- involving very advanced font-features -- but not so much on the simple case -- involving insertions of tatweel. That may seem counter-intuitive, usually the simple comes before the complex ;-) Let me know how things work, and you can write me off-list. Best wishes Idris -- Professor Idris Samawi Hamid Department of Philosophy Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523
arabic-poem.tex
Description: TeX document
hemistiches.tex
Description: TeX document
arabic-poem.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
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