General ⇒ Eliminating 'complex' ligatures in ArabTeX

[gkamel]

I am working on a book containing Arabic and Enlish text in parallel columns, and am using ArabTeX to produce the Arabic. However, I am faced with a problem of lines overlapping due to ArabTeX automatically outputting ligatures of certain letter combinations, e.g. 'lam' followed by 'meem', whereby the letters are virtually stacked upon each other. I realise that this is common writing practice, but for a book, it would require unappealingly large line spacing.

So, is there a way of switching off 'complex' ligatures in ArabTeX?

Thanks.

[renno]

Hey George,

I have not used ArabTeX, so I am afraid I cannot answer your question. However, I wanted to recommend the package 'arabi' by Yousef Jabri. Looking at the manual and the examples included there, I thought that package is very powerful, so you might want to give it a try.

Cheers,