On 2013–08–26 J. R. Schmid wrote:

> I've played around with your module and ran into some problems
> which may have been due to my inexperiencedness with ConTeXt
> (rupturing of ligatures, at least with Scheherazade and
> inconsistent line height). Marco has been helping me though, and
> it looks like he solved those problems while improving on your
> module while doing so. He doesn't seem to be done with it yet and
> perhaps he'll want to reply himself when he is, so I'll leave it
> at that for now :-)

I don't do any Arabic typesetting myself, but I wrapped Idris' idea
into a nicer interface¹. Since I don't use it myself, I'll leave it
like that until I receive feedback or improvement suggestions.
There's no documentation yet, as I don't know how useful this is in
the first place.

In contrast to Latin script, justifying Arabic text is not solely
achieved by varying the inter-word space, but also by means of
elongating particular glyps². After having read Idris' article³ it
seems like this is a font feature. However, I have no idea which
particular feature is responsible for the elongation and how many
fonts actually have it. I could not find the mentioned Husayni font
anywhere, which seems to be able to do this. So for the time being
the justification is only done by varying the inter-word space.

Arabic is beautiful!

Marco

¹ https://github.com/mpfusion/context-arabic-verse
² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashida
³ https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb31-2/tb98hamid.pdf