Arabic poetic verse sign (0x060E)

Question

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I’m looking to print a book which includes markers showing the beginning of sections of poetry, as shown in the image here.

I’m wondering how to get this to work in ptxprint. In particular, how should I markup the text and what settings should I set in ptxprint?

I’m thinking something like

\zpoetry ؎
\q1 یا خدا تعلےٰ۔۔۔

but obviously there might be some other way to do it. It would be nice if the first line of poetry were labelled with the same marker as other lines, so that any future format adjustments would be easier and more consistent.

It not necessary, but if there is any way to have this display correctly in PT or at least have the poetry marker on the same line, that would be a bonus.

Answer 1

Yes you can do this but it’ll take a snippet. Here’s an example of doing the same thing with a bullet character. The markup is to place the character as the first character on the poetry line as part of the text (after any verse numbers etc.) rather than pulling it out with its own marker. The reason is that it’s easier to treat the text within the paragraph rather than trying to ‘annotate’ the paragraph:

\catcode`\^=7
\def\hangbullet{\leavevmode\llap{\hbox to 0pt{\kern -15pt ^^^^00b7}}}
\DefineActiveChar{^^^^00b7}{\hangbullet}

I didn’t have the fonts, etc. to try switching 00b7 with 060e (note the lower case, that’s important) but I did try this RTL as well as LTR and it works in both cases. Insert in your ptxprint-mods.tex

Comments

Thank you. That worked great.