Hi JR,

On Fri, 23 Aug 2013 15:12:54 -0600, J. R. Schmid <jrs@weitnahbei.de> wrote:

> for better or worse, I'm trying to typeset Arabic poetry in ConTeXt

For better :-)

> after having become fed up with LaTeX for a variety of reasons. Arabic  
> script itself is not a problem and I already love how easy it is to use  
> whatever font you like and how clean ConTeXt seems to be in its design.
>
> What is giving me trouble, though, is the face that traditionally,  
> poetry needs to be typeset in two columns. Using an English poem for an  
> example, it'd look a little bit like this:
>
>                  Said Rich Accetta-Evans:
>
>    1 My  poem  delights  me    2 My   poem   is   mine
>    3 It is like fresh bread    4 When I bake it myself
>    5 It   is  like  my  son    6 The  day  he was born
>    [...]
>
> This is to be read in the order of the numbers, so "columns" or  
> "simplecolumns" won't work (I think).

I have an experimental/rudimentary module that does this. It needs some
work to get, e.g., better widths for automatic typesetting in the
high-level code (tracking the dynamic \hsize in ConTeXt) but you are
welcome to try it. See the attached module and test file.

>
> The second problem is the way in which Arabic needs to be justified,  
> namely not by adjusting the space between words, but instead by  
> adjusting the connecting line between letters:
>
>                 قال أبو الطيب أحمد بن الحسين المتنبّي
>
>    أنـا الـذي نـظر الأعمى إلـى أدبي  وأسمعـت كـلماتــي مـن به صمم
>    كم تـطلبون لـنا عيبًـا فــيعجزكم  ويكره المجد ما تأتـون والكرم
>    ما أبعـد العيب والنقصان عن شرفي  أنا الثّريا وذان الشيب والهرم
>    [...]
>
> I couldn't find any info on either of these two questions through the  
> documentation or through Google (although I might have been looking for  
> the wrong keywords). Any comments are appreciated! :-)

I'm hoping that this will be implemented in the coming months. Hans and I
have done work on the general case -- involving very advanced
font-features -- but not so much on the simple case -- involving
insertions of tatweel. That may seem counter-intuitive, usually the simple
comes before the complex ;-)

Let me know how things work, and you can write me off-list.

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