[XeTeX] caption problem with polyglossia

[François Charette]

Mehdi Omidali wrote:
> The problem of author and table caption is realy from the tabular problem in
> bidi. in fact, if you write more than one word in a tabular component it is
> shown in the opposite direction. If you look at the definition of the maketitle
> you see it realy is a tabular environment so the problem is from there. A couple
> of months ago I wrote an style file in which I resolved this problem. This style
> also resolve some other problems, namely prantesis around an equation problem
> and problem with the \numberwithin command. In my experience changing the page
> counter is not a good idea because for example makeindex doesn't work anymore.
> In this style I borrowed a changing number macro from rlbabel.def to redefine
> the \arabic command so that it support many packages. 
polyglossia also redefines \@arabic in the case of the Arabic, Syriac, 
Hebrew and Thai scripts. I have yet to do it for Hindi as well.
> I have included a copy of
> my farsixetex.tex style and a compiled version of Vafa's file in which the
> problems have been removed, in case this might be helpful.
> http://www.omidali.com/vafa.rar
>   
Thanks for this.

A general comment: As I personally don't write documents with RL as main 
writing direction (I usually deal with critical editions of Arabic 
within English papers or books), I do not have the possibility you guys 
have in testing real-world documents for which RL is the main direction. 
I am well aware that what my bidi package current supports is still 
rather limited in that regard. (In the initial version I have 
intentionally refrained from redefining the macros of document classes). 
I have recently improved a few things (notably the captions), but I do 
not have the time and energy to implement RL support for *all* possible 
features of *all* available classes! :)

Thus I strongly encourage you all (especially the Farsi-speaking 
community which seems to be particularly dynamic!) to send me patches to 
bidi or polyglossia (ideally using subversion) whenever you can.

Best,
François