Decision Guidance ⇒ Newbie: need editor suitable for complex translation from Arabic

[eteb3]

Hi, my first real post here. Looking for a steer on our use-case.

Is LaTeX a good option for us?
Any pointers for how to proceed next?

A friend and I are translating some works out of Arabic.

Typesetting them in Word is impossibly ugly - eg here .

The text will be largely in English, but we also need:

• - some Arabic text in its usual form
  - transliterated Arabic, so many diacritics (eg ʿ Ṣ ā )
  - compressed honorifics (like this one)
  - footnotes of our own
  - footnotes from the original work, if possible distinguished from ours
  - multiple typographic styles to distinguish different elements within the source text*
  - endnotes

Above all (and this is why I think LaTeX may be our solution) we need to be able to code the headings, transliterations, block-quotes, etc, as we translate. We'll think about the attributes of Heading3 style, or QuranQuote style, later.

Many thanks.

*for anyone familiar with the genre, it's Sabuni's tafsir: the author quotes extensively from others, from the Qur'an, and from the hadiths. As usual there is little typographic help in the original, since that's not part of the literary culture.