Aleph - description & more info

Aleph - description & more info

[Mojca Miklavec]

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Dear ConTeXt-ers,

I have

Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many
are using it. I've seen some

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:08:33 -0700, Mojca Miklavec  
<mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many
> are using it. I've seen some

Your message died off, but feel free to ask me any questions u have about  
Aleph, which I use quite extensively, and without which I would be lost-)

Giuseppe is the main developer and we owe him a great debt of gratitude  
for stabilizing it to the point where it can be used for reliable  
bidirectional production purposes using large fonts. Personally, I really  
cannot thank him enough-)

Hans & Co. are pursuing getting all of Aleph's useful features into  
pdftex, so maybe the the two projects will merge after Giuseppe gets some  
time.

Useful aleph features + opentype support in pdfTeX will open a new vista  
where the encoding file mess can be thrown away and even virtual fonts  
will no longer be needed.

One challenge will be replacing the otp filter mechanism with something  
more user-friendly. I am a bit worried that this will be more difficult  
than expected, but we'll see.

Best
Idris

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Mojca Miklavec]

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Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:08:33 -0700, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
> > Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many
> > are using it. I've seen some
>
> Your message died off, but feel free to ask me any questions u have about
> Aleph, which I use quite extensively, and without which I would be lost-)

(Scary! I thought I saved the message under drafts - I have no idea
how I managed to send it without even noticing that.)

Thanks for your kind reply. I mainly wanted to ask if someone could
have written something about Aleph to the wiki.

There is hardly any info about it on internet except the Hans's
manual. There's a mailing list, which is hardly active and there are a
couple of one-sentence descriptions spread over different tex-related
sites. So the wiki might be a good place for "Aleph homepage".

I was wondering about the current state of development (which you
mostly described in this mail) - ie. that there is some effort to
include the functionality in pdfTeX, that it's stable and currently
not developed that fast.

It would be nice to mention how to manipulate fonts with many glyphs
and how to use them. For example, there's a font Arial Unicode on
every PC with Office with over 50.000 glyphs. Since we (PC users) are
not able to use XeTeX, it would be fine to have an example of how to
use this font under windows and perhaps an example of how to typeset
arabic, hebrew or some other (right-to-left) language. How can
symbolic fonts be used there?

Patrick has enough to do, I'm sure, but perhaps there could be some
collaboration with Hraban (and you?) to enable also some more fancy
fonts and languages to be used on the garden. I think that Patrick
already put some effort into enabling Chinese to work (I'm not sure
about it). Currently there are also many .tfm for common fonts
missing.
If Aleph could work there as well and if some additional fonts would
be installed, this would be fantastic.

Thanks again,
    Mojca


> Giuseppe is the main developer and we owe him a great debt of gratitude
> for stabilizing it to the point where it can be used for reliable
> bidirectional production purposes using large fonts. Personally, I really
> cannot thank him enough-)
>
> Hans & Co. are pursuing getting all of Aleph's useful features into
> pdftex, so maybe the the two projects will merge after Giuseppe gets some
> time.

this would be more than wonderful!

> Useful aleph features + opentype support in pdfTeX will open a new vista
> where the encoding file mess can be thrown away and even virtual fonts
> will no longer be needed.
>
> One challenge will be replacing the otp filter mechanism with something
> more user-friendly. I am a bit worried that this will be more difficult
> than expected, but we'll see.
>
> Best
> Idris

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

Hi Mojca,

Here is a place to start ():

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html

I am a bit overwhelmed right now, will try to do something more when  
things get better (including wiki, etc). Someone on the FontForge list got  
Minion Opticals working in Aleph or Omega; I'll see if he would be willing  
to share how he did it.

And please send queries to the aleph list as well. Yes, the traffic is  
low, but it heats up every now and then-)

Best
Idris

PS I have a lot of sample files for rl-lr typesetting floating around the  
aleph and old omega lists. Your system should have the omega support files  
(mostly fonts and ocp's), which I do not think come with XeMTeX, though  
the last fpTeX version should have them.

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:05:45 -0700, Mojca Miklavec  
<mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
>> On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:08:33 -0700, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> > Many people know something about Aleph, but I guess that not so many
>> > are using it. I've seen some
>>
>> Your message died off, but feel free to ask me any questions u have  
>> about
>> Aleph, which I use quite extensively, and without which I would be  
>> lost-)
>
> (Scary! I thought I saved the message under drafts - I have no idea
> how I managed to send it without even noticing that.)
>
> Thanks for your kind reply. I mainly wanted to ask if someone could
> have written something about Aleph to the wiki.

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523

--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Mojca Miklavec]

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Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
> Hi Mojca,
>
> Here is a place to start ():
>
> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html

Thank you. The next thing that I found was
http://omega.enstb.org/papers/. I forgot about looking for papers for
Omega.

> And please send queries to the aleph list as well. Yes, the traffic is
> low, but it heats up every now and then-)

OK.

> Best
> Idris
>
> PS I have a lot of sample files for rl-lr typesetting floating around the
> aleph and old omega lists. Your system should have the omega support files
> (mostly fonts and ocp's), which I do not think come with XeMTeX, though
> the last fpTeX version should have them.

I didn't try it yet, but MikTeX has ocp files in the tree.

Thanks again,
    Mojca

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Mojca Miklavec]

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Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
> Hi Mojca,
>
> Here is a place to start ():
>
> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html

After some experimenting I managed to get your example on
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega/gamma/README
to kind-of-work.

I get those strange arabic and whatever-strange-script-glyphs, but
just a short question: how to typeset in utf-8?

Neither with nor without \enableregime[utf] it doesn't work.

(I had to remove an unrecognized option --translate-file=natural.tcx
from texexec.ini and to change the switch in texexec.pl from --engine=
to --alias= to make the example work at all.)

Thank you,
    Mojca

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 14:21:39 -0700, Mojca Miklavec  
<mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:
>> Hi Mojca,
>>
>> Here is a place to start ():
>>
>> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega-example.html
>
> After some experimenting I managed to get your example on
> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d97ost/omega/gamma/README
> to kind-of-work.
>
> I get those strange arabic and whatever-strange-script-glyphs, but
> just a short question: how to typeset in utf-8?
>

The point is that you have to set up the otp filters to use the utf-8  
filter instead of the transcription filter. See below...

If you already have the regular omega support files in MiKTeX etc, then  
great. Otherwise:
Here is a set of instructions for ConTeXt users:

1. Get the omega support files:

http://www.ctan.org/get?fn=/systems/win32/fptex/0.7/package/omega.zip
http://www.ctan.org/get?fn=/systems/win32/fptex/0.7/package/omegafonts.zip

2. Get rid of the following directories from omega.zip (not really  
necessary but if u want to be efficient):

texmf/eomega
texmf/omega/encodings

3. Put files in texmf-local;

4. Compile the Aleph format:

mktexlsr

texexec --make en -tex=aleph

5. Always start aleph files with this preamble:

% tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx

Now test: texexec the following file (in utf-8). I have included a  
modified version of the one u already have for xtra practice-)

Study \def\ArabicUTF: it uses raw omega/aleph commands, but see also  
m-gamma.tex (in the ConTeXt distro) for some higher-level commands

\definefiltersynonym
\definefiltersequence
\usefiltersequence

Have fun!

Best
Idris

==========================================================
% tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx
\hoffset=0pt

\def\ArabicUTF{\ocp\UTFArUni=inutf8 %% in88596
                %\ocp\UTFArUni=in88596
                \ocp\UniCUni=uni2cuni
                \ocp\CUniArab=cuni2oar % ocp's used

                \ocplist\UTFArOCP=
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \UTFArUni
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \UniCUni
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \CUniArab
                \nullocplist           % ocp list

                \pushocplist\UTFArOCP} % apply this filter sequence

\input m-gamma.tex
\input type-omg.tex
\switchtobodyfont[omarb,12pt] %

\textdir TRT%
\pardir TRT%
\ArabicUTF

\starttext

  ، ۪

  Ø› ØŸ

  ء آ أ ؤ إ ئ ا ب ة ت ث ج ح خ د

  ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ

  ـ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ى ي ً  ٌ  ٍ َ  ُ

  ِ ّ  ْ

  Ù  Ù¡ Ù¢ Ù£ Ù¤ Ù¥ Ù¦ Ù§ Ù¨ Ù© Ùª Ù«

  Ù¬ Ù° Ù± Ù¾

  Ú†

  Ú˜

  Ú¤ Ú¯

  Ú¾

  ۀ ہ ۃ ې ے ۓ ۔ ە

  Û° Û± Û² Û³ Û´ Ûµ Û¶ Û· Û¸ Û¹

% ا ب ج د ه و ز

\stoptext
=================================================================

Here's another file, similar to the one you started with:

=================================================================
% tex=aleph output=dvipdfmx
\input m-gamma.tex
\input type-omg.tex

\def\ArabicUTF{\ocp\UTFArUni=inutf8 %% in88596
                %\ocp\UTFArUni=in88596
                \ocp\UniCUni=uni2cuni
                \ocp\CUniArab=cuni2oar
                \ocplist\UTFArOCP=
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \UTFArUni
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \UniCUni
                \addbeforeocplist 1 \CUniArab
                \nullocplist
                \pushocplist\UTFArOCP}

\setupbodyfont[omlgc,12pt]

\showframe[text]

\starttext%

\start

\ArabicUTF\switchtobodyfont[omarb]%
      \textdir TRT\pardir TRT

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الله اكبر من
أن يوصف

\stop

\textbullet\ This is a test coffin

{\tfb \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\tfc \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\tfd \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\tfx \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\tfxx \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\bf \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

{\bfc \textbullet\ This is a test coffin}

\startgreek

\textbullet\ A B G D a b g d

{\tfc \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d}

{\bf \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d}

{\bfc \textbullet\ A B G D a b g d}

\stopgreek

\startarab

`rby:

\textbullet\ A b t th j H kh

{\tfc \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh}

{\bf \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh}

{\bfc \textbullet\ A b t th j H kh}

fArsy:

{\tfc \textbullet\ A b p t th j ch H kh}

\starturdu

ArdU:

{\tfc \textbullet\ A b p t 't th j ch H kh}

\stopurdu

`rby:

bsm ALLah Al-rrHmn Al-rrHym

fArsy:

bh nAm khdAwnd b-kh-sh-nde mhrbAn

\starturdu

ArdU:

ALLah kE nAm sE jw rHmAn w rHym hE

\stopurdu

\stoparab

\stoptext

=================================================================

-- 
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523

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Re: Aleph - description & more info

[Idris Samawi Hamid]

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I'm sending the test files as attachments, since utf-8 does not always  
come through email...

Best
Idris

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