Hi, I’m a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and have been using LaTeX for the past few years. My work is on early Baghdadi Sufism and more recently on scientific learning in Islamic Spain.

I’m writing this blog because there aren’t many good resources for beginners and non-scientists who are working with LaTeX – I’d like to change that.

If you don’t know already, LaTeX, at its simplest, is a tool for creating documents; but I’m not your typical LaTeX user…

English and Arabic in a LaTeX document

I’m using LaTeX for displaying non-latin (e.g Arabic and Persian) alphabets, different transliteration styles, and its elegant, professional-quality output.

Ultimately, I use LaTeX because it’s so efficient compared with Microsoft Word – you’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to enter a paragraph of Arabic in an English document or manage hundreds of references in a document that’s 600 pages long.

LaTeX is largely used by the scientific community, so much of the support and documentation is for them – it can be difficult to track down information for the humantities.

I hope the information here saves you time and helps you get to grips with LaTeX and the package I use for working with Arabic script – ArabTeX.