Writing Persian

target: fa — Persian, فارسی, in the Arabic script, written right to left. It is the studio’s first language and its default: a document that names no target: is a Persian one.

1. How its text is found#

Persian needs no mark. Every stretch of the Arabic script in the prose is a Persian run: words parted by single spaces stay one run, and the zero-width non-joiner, the Persian digits ۰–۹ and the marks ، ؛ ؟ belong to it. A Latin letter, a western digit or Latin punctuation ends it.

---target: fa---Persian inside English needs no mark: سلام *salām*, hello, and می‌روم *mi-ravam*, I go.قطره قطره جمع گردد، وانگهی دریا شودامروز هوا خیلی خوب است. با دوستم به پارک می‌روم![امروز یک فایل PDF برای معلمم فرستادم.]{tl}

• A paragraph of nothing but Persian letters, spaces and Persian punctuation is a display line, set larger.
• A paragraph with no Latin letter — a Latin full stop, ! or a western digit is allowed — is a Persian paragraph, right to left.
• A Persian sentence that holds a Latin word is marked, […]{tl}: {fa} and the old {rtl} are the same mark.

2. Faces and direction#

On the screen Persian is set in Vazirmatn, which comes with the toolbox, with Noto Naskh Arabic behind it; on paper in Vazirmatn too. The second face, font=nastaliq, is Noto Nastaliq Urdu — the flowing hand of Persian poetry, which comes with the toolbox too — set with taller lines, since its letters hang far below the line.

---target: fa---[بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکرند ⏎که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند]{tl font=nastaliq bg=quote}

Persian text is set 1.52 times the size of the prose. Right to left is the browser’s work on the screen; on paper it is set with TeX’s own right-to-left commands, and every PDF build then reads the Persian back off the page, glyph by glyph, and counts the strings it found in the right order (the […]{tl} blocks, laid out whole, excepted). A Latin word inside a Persian block keeps its own direction, and a bracket in it is turned the way the sentence reads.

Persian cannot be set vertically: vertical is ignored.

3. The zero-width non-joiner#

Persian keeps the parts of some words apart without a space: the prefix می, the plural ها, the suffixes. The character that does it — the zero-width non-joiner, nim-fāsele — is typed by the editor’s ZWNJ button, and is part of the word it sits in.

---target: fa---می‌روم *mi-ravam* I go, کتاب‌ها *ketāb-hā* books, خانه‌ای *xāne-i* a house.

4. Punctuation#

Persian punctuation — ، ؛ ؟ — goes inside a Persian sentence or clause of its own, typically a […]{tl} block or a Persian paragraph. Between Persian words that stand in English prose, use the prose’s comma: a Persian comma there is taken into the Persian run beside it, and set as part of it.

5. Vocabulary entries#

Three parts after the headword’s own: transliteration, origin, meaning.

---target: fa---## کتاب | ketāb | from Arabic *kitāb* | = *book*## [خانه]{teal translit:xāne} | | Middle Persian *xānag* | = *house*

6. Transliteration#

A Persian word’s translit: is the transliteration of what is said — colloquial forms as heard, mi-kone when that is what is spoken — in one scheme for every document, whatever the prose is written in:

• long ā, short a e o; long i u written plainly;
• š = ش, č = چ, ž = ژ, x = خ;
• q for both ق and غ, and an apostrophe, ', for both ع and ء;
• the emphatics flattened: س ص ث are s, ز ذ ض ظ z, ت ط t, ه ح h;
• the parts of a word hyphenated where the grammar is transparent: mi-, nemi-, be-, na-, the ezafe -e/-ye, the plural -hā (spoken -ā), the indefinite -i, the clitic pronouns -am -et -eš -emun -etun -ešun, the object -o; a zero-width non-joiner inside a word becomes a hyphen.

---target: fa---[می‌کنه]{translit:mi-kone} *he does*, [خانهٔ من]{translit:xāne-ye man} *my house*,[کتاب‌ها]{teal translit:ketāb-hā} *books*.

Persian has no reading: kana: means nothing in a Persian document.