arabtex-granada

arabtex-granada is a maintained, self-contained distribution derived from Klaus Lagally's ArabTeX. It generates Arabic script from transliterated input, adds the transcription convention used by the School of Arabists of Granada, and makes the historical runtime compatible with current LaTeX package hooks.

Version: 1.0.0 (2026-08-15)

Authors and maintenance

• Klaus Lagally is the original author and copyright holder of ArabTeX.
• Francisco M. García is the author of the arabtex-granada adaptation and its current maintainer: https://github.com/ringstellung.

Please report issues with this derived distribution at https://github.com/ringstellung/arabtex-grsp/issues. Do not ask Klaus Lagally to support arabtex-granada. The GitHub repository still uses its previous URL until it is renamed separately.

The original ArabTeX distribution is available from https://ctan.org/pkg/arabtex.

Installation and usage

arabtex-granada includes the ArabTeX runtime, metrics, Type 1 fonts, METAFONT sources, and font map that it needs. The CTAN arabtex package is therefore not a dependency and should not be loaded alongside this package.

For a manual TDS installation, copy:

• arabtex-granada.sty and vendor/texinput/ to tex/latex/arabtex-granada/;
• vendor/tfm/ to fonts/tfm/public/arabtex-granada/;
• vendor/type1/ to fonts/type1/public/arabtex-granada/;
• vendor/metafont/ to fonts/source/public/arabtex-granada/; and
• vendor/map/arabtex.map to fonts/map/dvips/arabtex-granada/.

Refresh the TeX filename database and enable arabtex.map using the tools provided by your TeX distribution. CTAN, TeX Live, and MiKTeX installations normally perform these steps automatically.

Load the package with:

\usepackage{arabtex-granada}

To select the Granada transcription convention, use:

\settrans{spanish}

The convention inherits ArabTeX's ZDMG transcription and changes these mappings:

See examples/arabtex-granada-example.tex for a complete document. The package guide is available as arabtex-granada-doc.pdf, with its editable LaTeX source in arabtex-granada-doc.tex.

Building the CTAN upload

Run:

make build

This builds the PDF guide and creates dist/arabtex-granada.zip. The Makefile stages only the files in the new distribution, puts them below the required top-level arabtex-granada/ directory, and runs unzip -t to verify the archive. Use make clean to remove generated build and distribution directories.

What differs from ArabTeX

The public project and package name is arabtex-granada. Its private vendor/ tree contains byte-identical runtime and font files from the original ArabTeX distribution; those historical files retain Klaus Lagally's authorship and copyright. Three renamed derived loader files keep every internal load inside that tree even when upstream ArabTeX is also installed. The files are bundled so that arabtex-granada is a standalone package rather than a plug-in that depends on a separately installed arabtex.

The new entry package makes two changes around that private runtime:

1. It preserves the LaTeX kernel definitions of \begin and \end on modern formats. ArabTeX's 2003 replacements leave \begin{document} in a group while deferred package hooks run, which causes packages such as graphicx to fail with Loading a class or package in a group.
2. It registers \settrans{spanish} for the School of Granada convention, mapping ^g to ŷ, _h to j, and .g to g.

Older LaTeX formats that do not provide the modern hook interface retain ArabTeX's historical environment behavior.

License

This derived work is distributed under the LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3c or (at your option) any later version. Its LPPL maintenance status is maintained, and its Current Maintainer is Francisco M. García. See lppl.txt for the license text.

The bundled original files are copyright Klaus Lagally and were released under LPPL version 1 or, at the user's option, any later version. Their source, authorship, and history are identified in vendor/README.md and vendor/ORIGINAL_README.txt. Francisco M. García's copyright applies only to the arabtex-granada adaptation, documentation, packaging, and new Granada convention—not retroactively to the original ArabTeX code.

CTAN archive

The upload archive should contain one top-level directory named arabtex-granada and the files listed in MANIFEST. The older top-level source tree retained in this repository is development history and is not part of the new package archive.