Right To Left Alternatives

[nawkboy]

As Affinity Publisher does not currently support RTL languages such as Arabic, what are the best choices for doing so?

Before happily switching to Affinity Publisher I used Adobe InDesign and paid the monthly tax. For my occasional typesetting needs, there hasn't been anything significant in InDesign that I have missed. Now I find myself contemplating the idea of an Arabic translation for some of my content, and I realize it will be a while before Affinity Publisher supports RTL languages.

So, if looking to translate an English book to a few languages (Spanish and Arabic in particular), what is the best choice of layout tool? Is there any cost effective language that handles the same work being in multiple languages with minimal layout changes better than other choices? Built-in support for an initial pass using machine translation would be great.

Is going back to InDesign for this particular need the best choice? Are there any alternatives worth mentioning which Affinity fans like?

[Andreas Scherer]

I'd take a look at XeTeX.

[nawkboy]

Interesting thought to go back to TeX. I had not considered that in the context of multi-lingual typesetting. Wondering how well that will work with all the heavy figures involved. I'm not sure auto-flowed layout without tweaking here and there will be that good. Sure will be easy to run through machine translation, and will gain proper source control.

What I would really like is graphical layout, coupled with semantic text markup. As I recall from using LaTeX years ago, the semantic markup was great, and layout was a pain. With InDesign and Affinity Publisher layout is great, and semantic markup is a pain.

[nawkboy]

Are there any good canned scripts for feeding TeX/XeTeX through the various machine translation services?