TeTeX-ArabTeX
Kaiser (homo mæthimaticus), also a LaTeX guru, informed me once that there’s a LaTeX library called ArabTeX (عربتاخ) which consists of the following: you write your Arabic text as you pronounce in Latin characters, and the module converts it to Arabic (yes, simply!); furthermore, if you require it, your text will be accentuated (الشّكل) and even knows the correct position of al-hamza (الهمزة)!
I tried it, it was hard at first to know how to “translate” each character to Latin, but after some hours of self-torturing (I copied a whole article from a magazine), I noticed that I’m more quick with ArabTeX than writing with an Arabic keyboard!
In addition, the same library handles Hebrew (HebTeX), Farsi (plus Ottoman and Kurdish), Urdu, Pashto and Sindi (Unfortunately, I don’t speak any of the languages below to test them).
The library is a free software (LaTeX Public License) and is developed by … a German! Prof. Klaus Lagally, Universitaet Stuttgart.
You can get the macro files here.
I wrote a sample, extracted from the book The Mad by Gibran Khalil Gibran, in both in English and Arabic, you can download it by clicking here… The compressed file contains both the generated PDF and the TeX source, which can not be compiled unless you install the ArabTeX library.
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:58 am
I can put tutorial for ArabTeX in your blog if you like, in addition to that I have created so many files in arabic and persian and I also can let you put them in your blog to see how we can type those languages by ArabTeX.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:49 am
Thanks Vafa, that would be very helpful.