Re: TeX and Arabic

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at sharif dot edu>]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Alaa The Great wrote:

> there is project Omega which aims at TeX support for all languages (at
> least those that are in active use, I don't know what is the state of
> arabic support though).

It is excellent, as far as you can manage to write the supporting macros
yourself. We *seriously* need volunteers to make Omega development active.

> one promising project is FarsiTeX, FarsiTeX is GPLd software being
> developed in Iran

Yoohoo! That's us!

> it has tremendous support from universities and the
> ministry of culture there,

No, the support is very bad, and the developers need to pay from their 
personal pocket even to attend a TeX conference. It *has been supported* 
by those people, but currently, the only supporter is Science and Arts 
Foundation (http://www.science-arts.org/).

> if we manage to get enough arabic developers to contribute we could have
> the answer

I don't know what kind of answer you're really seeking, but we are trying
to merge all the FarsiTeX efforts with the main TeX tools, including
Omega. Since we're targetting Persian, Arabic will get in almost
automatically.

> since the project aims at offering user friendly tools with wysiwym and
> wysiwyg interfaces, it should be easy to support it from within LyX and
> Docbook when it is ready.

No, it's not, as far as I, FarsiTeX's technical manager, know. We will
appreciate any effort toward WYSIWY* interfaces, but that's not a main
goal (or even a goal) of FarsiTeX.

There's already some patches to get FarsiTeX working with LyX. Behdad may 
be able to point you to the patches. Behdad?

roozbeh