Hi Denis,

See this page [https://wiki.contextgarden.net/RTL] which may need some
updating.  I have some more definitions here [
https://github.com/bateni/dabeer/blob/master/texmf-local/tex/context/modules/dabeer/mkiv/p-dabeer.mkiv],
though it's partly to handle differences between Persian and Arabic.

Not all directions are reversed automatically. Beside footnotes, you might
need to do it for tables, columns, pages, headers, footers, registers
(index), etc. I don't recall if sorting was done properly for Arabic
(needed for registers). Some trickery may be needed to get the RTL right
when numbers are involved, say, for enumerations (theorems, lemma, etc.)
and TOC numbering. These are not specific to Arabic, though, and should
surface for Hebrew as well.

Once in a while I run into problems with misoriented parentheses or
quotation marks (specially https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C2%AB_%C2%BB).
This may be due to setupdirection algorithms or a side effect of how some
Context commands work. One needs to document them, so a fix is uploaded.

Depending on what you want to typeset, you may need to change the numerals
(for page numbers, enumerations, figure and table numbers, etc.) as well as
dates, etc.  Some of these are already handled via the \mainlanguage[ar]
command.

Regards,
MHB

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 2:46 AM Denis Maier <denis.maier.lists@mailbox.org>
wrote:

> Hi
>
> Just wondering what the current support for Arabic is. Does anyone know?
> My document works fine for Hebrew and I've just added a new fontfallbac:
> \definefallbackfamily[mainface][rm][Scheherazade] [range=arabic,
> force=yes, features=arabic]
>
> Bidi is activated with \setupdirections[bidi=global,method=unicode]
>
> Is that enough for Arabic? Or are there other things I need to take care
> of?
>
> E.g. searching in the mailing-list archive I found this message:
> https://www.mail-archive.com/ntg-context@ntg.nl/msg78573.html
>
>
>  > You have to set the bidi settings again for the footnotes because
>  > the notes mechanism resets many of these setups.
>
>  > \startsetups[note:footnote]
>  > \setupdirections[bidi=global]
>  > \stopsetups
>  >
>  > \setupnote[footnote][setups=note:footnote] % align=righttoleft
>
> Is that still true? Anything else I need to be aware of?
>
> Best,
> Denis
>
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