Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>Nicholas Bodley wrote:
>
>
>>On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 01:26:15 -0400, suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...>
>>quoted:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Trivedi writes, "The new technological developments in typesetting have
>>>finally removed all constraints which inhibited the development of
>>>Devanagari script."
>>>
>>>
>>I think it's worth noting than computers have, more than likely, been a
>>real boon to typesetting Arabic script. Scientific American, roughly a
>>decade ago, had a very fine article about modern typesetting of Arabic.
>>
>>
>
>Nothing practical, though. And Mac somehow lost WorldScript I (the
>R-to-L scripts) on the way to OS X. (It was in 7; not available in 9.)
>
>For a month or so there was a really fancy system (called GX, maybe?)
>that understood a very great deal about contextual variations -- Lloyd
>Anderson demonstrated it once -- but nothing came of it.
>

The man to read up on is Yannis Haralambous, who seems to be a whiz at
all sorts of tough typesetting. He's a computer guy, though, and most of
his papers deal with solutions involving his Omega typesetting software
(really just Unicode extensions added on to D. E. Knuth's TeX
typesetting program)--generally free for downloading.
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/ is his web page. I'm currently using
Omega and some assorted cleverness for some Hebrew typesetting of my
own, which could be a very interesting book if I keep up with it to the end.

~mark