Documents with text that is not in English¶
If you make figures containing text objects in languages other than English, you will need to enter accented characters, or characters from other scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic, Farsi, Arabic, Hangul, Kana, or Chinese characters.
Of course you can still use the LaTeX syntax K\"onig to enter the
German word “König”, but for larger runs of text it’s more convenient
to enter text in a script supported by your system. When Ipe writes
the LaTeX source file, it writes the text in UTF-8 encoded Unicode.
You have to make sure that your LaTeX setup can handle this file.
Pdflatex for latin and cyrillic scripts¶
An easy solution, sufficient for German, French, and other languages for which support is already in a standard LaTeX-setup, is to add the line
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
in your Latex preamble (set in the Document properties dialog, available on the Edit menu).
In addition, you may need to setup your document language. So, to use UTF-8 encoded Russian in LaTeX, your preamble would look like this:
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
When setting this up, you have to keep in mind that Ipe can only
handle scalable fonts, such as Postscript Type1 fonts. You’ll have to
choose a setup that uses such scalable fonts. Quite often it is
sufficient to install the package cm-super, which contains
Type1 versions of standard fonts.
If your LaTeX setup does not contain scalable fonts for your
document, it will often fall back on Metafont fonts in bitmapped Type3
format. Ipe will show an error message informing you about Type3
fonts in your LaTeX output. In that case, try installing
cm-super, or use a package that explicitly uses Postscript
fonts. For instance, for Russian you could install the PsCyr
package, and the following preamble:
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{pscyr}
Using Xetex¶
If you set the LaTeX engine to xetex (you set this in the
Document properties dialog, available on the Edit menu), then Ipe
will use Xelatex to convert your text objects to PDF. Xetex supports
Unicode natively, and will give you access to many scalable fonts on
your system.
For instance, to use Thai in your Ipe document, it suffices to set the
Latex engine to xetex, and to select a Thai font in the
preamble:
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Garuda}
(On a Unix-system, you can determine which fonts on your system
support Thai by saying fc-list :lang=th on the command line.)
Unfortunately, running Xetex is significantly slower than Pdflatex, so you may want to turn off the automatic running of LaTeX in the File menu.
If your script uses right-to-left writing, you will need some more effort.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean¶
Using Korean Hangul and Hanja in Ipe is quite easy, by placing this in your preamble:
\usepackage[utf]{kotex}
Japanese LaTeX-users had long used a specialized version of TeX.
Fortunately, the new luatex implementation makes this unnecessary,
so we can now typeset Japanese by setting the Latex engine to
luatex and including the luatexja package in the preamble:
\usepackage{luatexja}
To typeset Chinese, the xeCJK package of CTeX also works with
Ipe. Set the Latex engine to xetex, and include the
package in your preamble:
\usepackage{xeCJK}
Right-to-left writing: Farsi, Hebrew, and Arabic¶
Scripts with right-to-left writing require some extra care. The main document needs to be processed left-to-right for Ipe to work correctly. Only individual text objects can be translated using right-to-left mode.
Here are solutions that work for Farsi (Persian), Hebrew, and Arabic.
Persian¶
Include the stylesheet right-to-left.isy from the Ipe
stylesheet folder. It defines a text style rtl for
right-to-left text objects.
In the document properties (that is, in the Document properties
dialog, available on the Edit menu), set Latex engine to
xetex, and the Latex preamble to
\usepackage[documentdirection=lefttoright]{xepersian}
\settextfont{FreeFarsi}
I needed to install the packages texlive-lang-arabic and
fonts-freefarsi on my Linux system to use this. On a
Unix-system, you can determine which fonts on your system support
Farsi by saying fc-list :lang=fa on the command line.
It is important to set the option documentdirection=lefttoright
for the xepersian package, to make sure the main document is
processed in left-to-right mode.
You can now have text objects with Latin script using the
normal text style, and text objects with Persian script using
the rtl text style.
If you want, you can make rtl the default text style, with the
following customization:
prefs.initial_attributes.textstyle = "rtl"
If you do not use the right-to-left.isy stylesheet, then you have to put one more line in the preamble:
\ipedefinecolors{}
\usepackage[documentdirection=lefttoright]{xepersian}
\settextfont{FreeFarsi}
This is necessary, because Ipe normally loads the xcolors package
after processing the document preamble. Some packages (like bidi
and xepersian) require to be loaded after xcolors, so you
need to use \ipedefinecolors{} to load xcolors early. We
didn’t need this above, because the stylesheet right-to-left.isy
already contains the command.
Hebrew¶
Include the stylesheet right-to-left.isy from the Ipe
stylesheet folder. It defines a text style rtl for
right-to-left text objects.
In the document properties (that is, in the Document properties
dialog, available on the Edit menu), set Latex engine to
xetex, and the Latex preamble to
\ipedefinecolors{}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Liberation Serif}
\setmonofont{Liberation Mono}
\setsansfont{Liberation Sans}
\usepackage{bidi}
I needed to install the package texlive-lang-arabic to use the
bidi package. On a Unix-system, you can determine which fonts
on your system support Hebrew by saying fc-list :lang=he on the
command line.
You can now have text objects with Latin script using the
normal text style, and text objects in Hebrew using the
rtl text style.
If you want, you can make rtl the default text style, with the
following customization:
prefs.initial_attributes.textstyle = "rtl"
Arabic¶
In the document properties (that is, in the Document properties
dialog, available on the Edit menu), set Latex engine to
luatex, and the Latex preamble to
\usepackage{arabluatex}
If you don’t want to use the standard Amiri font, select another font in the preamble:
\newfontfamily\arabicfont[Script=Arabic]{KacstLetter}
On a Unix-system, you can list the fonts on your system supporting
Arabic by saying fc-list :lang=ar on the command line.
You can now create text objects in Arabic using the macro verb+arb+
and the environment arab.
The following stylesheet arabic.isy makes this more comfortable:
<ipestyle name="arabic">
<textstyle name="arabic" type="minipage" begin="\begin{arab}" end="\end{arab}"/>
<textstyle name="arabic" type="label" begin="\arb{" end="}"/>
</ipestyle>
If you add this stylesheet to your document, you can select the
arabic style for text objects, and directly write in Arabic
inside these objects.
If you want, you can make arabic the default text style, with the
following customization:
prefs.initial_attributes.textstyle = "arabic"