Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Well, it’s been a long time I’ve been thinking of porting form the damn WYSIWYG Microsoft Word and the Bogus OpenOffice.org for typesetting my documents both English and Farsi. Recently, I managed to prepare a number of English documents using LaTeX. I installed Texmaker, a Unicode support free LaTeX editor that integrates many tools needed to develop documents with LaTeX.

I seriously eager to learn to typeset Farsi documents using a TeX distribution. The first option could be the popular FarsiTex. But it is too old, the rediculous non-unicode support editor is also a disaster. A reliable product to typeset Farsi documents in TeX could be TeX-e-Parsi. However reliability is only one parameter
among many other parameters. In other words, TeX-e-Parsi has some shortcomings too. The main disadvantage is that you have to use its non-standard terrible editor, as before. TeX-e-Parsi is more suitable for a printing job.

Another choice is LyX, Farsi in LyX is based on a package called ARABI. This package has some problems too, which some of them can be easily resolved. The main advantage of ARABI is its flexibility in using the TeX engines, eTeX and pdfTeX, equally well. You can prepare your documents in Unicode.

There is also other option, which is based on a TeX engine called XeTeX. This engine is actually an eTeX-based engine that has three main advantages. It can use TrueType and OpenType fonts directly in contrast to all other TeX engines; it can handle ligatures and shaping automatically from the TrueType and OpenType fonts too; you can prepare your documents in Unicode. XeTeX is suitable both for a printing job and also for e-books and e-documents.

In my case, I chose to use XeTeX. It also still has some shortcommings, which I’ll try to resolve. I use the Texmaker Unicode-support editor to typeset my Farsi documents, the problem is that you should type Farsi in a Left to Right style with the letters seprated which really makes it hard to review the documents before compiling to a final DVI or PDF version.

Well, at last but not the least important I should really thank Mostafa Vahedi for all his useful comments and guiding me through the process of choosing and taking into use one of the TeX distributions for my own purpose. Also, I need to thank Mahmood Amintoosi and the Farsi LaTeX weblog for their helps on this issue.