Typing arabic for non-arabic speaker

[Gimson Ahmed <gimson at indo dot net dot id>]

Salam,

I've been trying to find information how to type arabic text along with latin 
(mixing bidirectional) in Linux environment, especially using KDE.

I have searched this mailing list and found that now I can enable arabic GUI 
and arabic html in Linux, using standardized i18n and unicode fonts. But my 
associates wants more using Arabic Windows as the sample. What I don't know 
are:
1. Using friendly word processor (maybe if there is ArabTex in GUI) to type 
bidirectional text. OpenOffice is available in bidirectional feature, but is 
this a standard feature, or just a tweaked version.
2. Creates arab-like character, with different charset (e.g. Arabic Jawi text) 
using my custom fonts.
3. Using existing non-unicode Arabic Windows fonts in Linux.

These needs are came up as my associates used lots of fully harkat arabic 
text. I have tried to create a windows-1256 html, but displayed bizzarely in 
Linux environment (Konqueror/Mozilla) as it didn't recognize 0 width 
character.

And lastly, how can I use strict fatha/kasra/dhammah when typing in MS Word 
(on Arabic Windows)? I viewed the font (traditional arabic) and sure that it 
has the correct character, but couldn't find way to get it.
-- 


--jim.