How to write Hindi numbers within Arabic text in Emacs 24? [closed]

Question

I use GNU Emacs 24.3.1. I want to write multilingual text including Arabic text and English text in one buffer. Problem is how to write Hindi numbers instead of Arabic numbers when writing Arabic text (ironically arabic numbers are the 1,2,3,...). Yep, that is a misnomer may be.

Hindi numbers I cannot write them over here (the second line in the screenshot below).

MS Word screenshot:

Notes:

• Windows 7-32 bit

Answer 1

You can enter them using C-x 8 followed by Enter and then the code point (e.g., 0661 for the Arabic-Indic digit one). That’s tedious, but a more satisfactory answer would not be about TeX or even about Emacs, but rather about configuration of the keyboard in Microsoft Windows. In GNU/Linux, I can enter Arabic digits directly by setting XKBLAYOUT to ara and XKBVARIANT to digits; that works in all of my text editors, which suggests that the problem you’re experiencing is not an Emacs problem.

EDIT

I use Debian, but Ubuntu is probably configured in much the same way. /etc/default/keyboard looks like this:

XKBMODEL="pc104"
XKBLAYOUT="us,gr,ara"
XKBVARIANT=",polytonic,digits"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:lwin_toggle,compose:rwin,grp_led:scroll"

Translation: The left windows key toggles between the usual US keyboard, polytonic Greek, and Arabic with the digits you want. The right windows key is a compose key, allowing me to get the characters needed to spell my name, among others. An LED lights up to alert me that the keyboard is in Greek or Arabic mode.

In .bashrc, I have export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim to make gtk programs acknowledge the compose key instead of doing their gnomish thing.

You’ll need to remember to toggle back to a Latin keyboard whenever you want to do something in the minibuffer, like saving the file. That wouldn’t be necessary if you found an ELisper who could customize the arabic input method of Emacs for you.

There’s a diagram of the keyboard on Dropbox.