Last Friday, the long awaited (more than 10 years now?) STIX fonts were released. However, the release disappointed many people who want to typeset mathematics with STIX fonts, as they neither released LaTeX support files nor supplemented the fonts with the new OpenType MATH extension, ruling out any quality math typesetting engine.

Trying to make a joke of the continuous delay and missed milestones, I promised to provide an OpenType enriched version of the fonts ''within a week of its release, provided that I'm still alive and able to use computers'', of course not believing they would ever release it. Now they proved me wrong and actually released the fonts, so I'm pleased to announce the first beta release of XITS font.

Arabic dots are diacritics and should be treated as diacritics, period.

Warning, a long and boring reading below.

I've been interested in the history of Bulaq Press in general, and the typefaces used there in particular, as I started working on my Bulaq revival font project.

I found two very valuable books about the subject; The History of Bulaq Press a master's thesis by Abu-Alfutuh Radwan, and Bulaq Press published by Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

I've been quiet about my traditional, naskh-like Arabic font project for a while, but it was slowly progressing.

بعد بعض العمل المركز هذا الشهر، اكتمل تعريب ومراجعة وحدات دروبال 6 الأساسية (القلب)، تجدها في صفحة مشروع التعريب.

إذا كنت تستخدم دروبال 6 فمن المحبذ أن تستخدم الترجمة الجديدة وتبلغ عن أي أخطاء أو مشاكل أو اقتراحات تراها، في صفحة المشروع.

في الفترة القادمة سنعمل على تعريب الوحدات الإضافية الأساسية، الجميع مدعوا للمساهمة والانضمام إلى مشروع التعريب.

دعوها فإنها منتنة

First attempts of Arabic math typesetting. Using ConTeXt MkIV, LuaTeX and my experimental XITS Math font.

صدرت جنوم ٢٫٢٨، مع واجهة عربية وتحسينات في الترجمة كالعادة، لا تتردد في تجربتها والإبلاغ عن أي أخطاء ومشاكل في الترجمة.

There are many legacy Arabic fonts floating on the web that can't be used in free operating systems, those fonts predate Unicode and OpenType and can only be used in MS Windows. There seem not exist any documentation of any kind regarding those fonts, and I had to guess how it is supposed to work. Out of boredom (and because someone asked me if there is a way to use those fonts in GNU/Linux), I wrote a Python script using FontForge's Python interface to convert them to Unicode with necessary OpenType layout to render them correctly.

I was trying to change the math font used in plain TeX (as opposed to LaTeX or ConTeXt), but I didn't seem to find it documented any where, apparently it is so obvious for TeXperts to be even documented. Anyway, I figured it out and I'm documenting it here so I don't have to search it again.

Set font families 0-3 to the new font, as follows:
0: math text ("sin", "cos", numbers, etc.)
1: math italic ("x", "y", "z", etc. don't have to be italic at all e.g. Euler)
2: math symbols
3: math extensions
\textfont: normal size font
\scriptfont: font for sub/super script