Emacs users and potential Emacs users might be interested to know that the development branch of Emacs now has working basic bidi support which is in need of wider testing. I can't testify to Arabic, Syriac or other RTL languages, but I've had good luck with vocalized Hebrew in the past few days. It makes typesetting XeLaTeX with Hebrew in Emacs much nicer.
To try it out you'll need: 1. The latest development sources of Emacs, including bzr and all the Emacs prereq's. In Debian-based Linux distributions, that's available using something like: $ sudo apt-get build-dep emacs23 $ sudo apt-get bzr mkdir ~/src/emacs cd ~/src/emacs Full instructions for building Emacs are in the INSTALL file: Mac users see here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS 2. For Hebrew and Yiddish, you'll want the brand-new input methods for Hebrew and Yiddish. See the attachment to this message: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bidi/597 I see that Emacs contains an older Arabic input method, which may also work. I don't know. 3. That's it. Build Emacs. To test bidi, evaluate this: (setq-default bidi-display-reordering t) At this point you can start up your bidi XeLaTeX files and hack away. To load the above mentioned Hebrew input methods: M-x load-library RET /path/to/abovementioned/hebrew.el M-x set-input-method RET hebrewTAB (to see the choices for Hebrew. There's a nice set of options, both for those with Hebrew-keyboard fingers and those who want a phonetic system. See the file hebrew.el for details.) It's a little bit of work to get it up and going, and if you find a bug it's another bit of work to file a proper report on the GNU bug tracker, but the developers are responsive, and keen to have bug reports. I think it's fair to say that bidi support is fairly' stable, perhaps even outright usable! You might find it instructive to read the last few weeks of the emacs-bidi mailing list, to catch up. http://news.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.bidi You can also send your questions to that list by subscribing here: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-bidi Hope this is of interest to someone. Scot -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
