Re: FarsiTeX equivalent?

[Otared KAVIAN <otared@gmail.com>]

Hi John,

I know that some people in Iran set up a nice bidirectional TeX
engine, called "FarsiTeX" or "ParsiTeX", but as you say in your
message it works only with LaTeX and on Windows (and on Unix systems
for a paid version). Unfortunately it seems that it is not maintained
anymore, at least as far as I know.

However, if your acquaintance uses MacOS X, there is a very nice
solution for bidirectional TeX: using XeTeX, either under PlainTeX, or
together with ConTeXt (or LaTeX) it is quite easy to typeset
multilingual texts in all directions (Left to Right, Right to Left,
and even very recently for Up to Bottom--Right to Left as it is done
in some Chinese books). I use to some extent XeTeX together with
ConTeXt (getting a format called sometimes "XeConTeXt") to write
Farsi, and the result is quite nice. For more informations on XeTeX,
developped and maintained by Jonathan Kew, see
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex
and for using XeTeX with ConTeXt (made possible thanks to hans Hagne
and Adam Lindsay) see the wikipgaes on Context Garden.

I hope these remarks will be useful.

Best regards: OK

On 12/1/05, John R. Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com> wrote:
> A person on the internet needs help using FarsiTeX, a bidirectional
> typesetting engine for Farsi and English. It only runs on LaTeX
> 2.09.
>
> If the same task were approached in Context, what would he need
> to do beyond the regular Context stuff?  Are there documents he
> should read?
>
> This is not a client, but just someone appealing for guidance.
>
> John Culleton
>
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