Hello Hartmut Niemann,
may be that the XeLaTex-package polyglossia could serve your purposes better
much better. You could use many languages in one document, also Arabic and
other RTL text.
Best wishes and best regards,
Jens Bakker
> Am 11.06.2024 um 12:06 schrieb Niemann, Hartmut via XeTeX <xetex@tug.org>:
>
> Hello!
>
> In my current project I use XeLaTeX to typeset PDF files from texts in
> different languages held in a separate database.
> (This is done with a generator that is language-unaware, generating lines like
> \long\def\msgtext{عطل في التهيئة البنيوماتية GS}
> Into a .inc file and a manually written, language dependent, frame document
> that defines \msgtext{}
>
> I typeset a (mostly) Arabic document using XeLaTeX and
> \usepackage{arabxetex}[utf]
>
> Arabxetex supports encoding Arabic in ASCII, and this interferes with the
> fact, that our texts have latin characters, like English abbreviations,
> location IDs and such.
> The documented solution would be enclosing these latin characters which are
> to be typeset verbally into \text{LR}, which is rather hard if the text comes
> from a database.
>
> Does anybody how to switch off arabxetex’s ASCII-to-arabic conversion
> completely?
>
> Or is there a package that supports Arabic (with Arabic typographic
> conventions) but made for pure Unicode sources?
>
> With best regards
>
> Hartmut Niemann
