Arabic text in a Scribus render frame

Despite some big efforts Scribus still does not support Arabic text... this could change soon, but -- as it often happens -- it will be there when it's ready... whatever that means.

But, if you need to put some Arabic text into Scribus, there is a workaround: use a "render frame" and Latex.
This won't allow you to create full books, since you can't link render frames, but it could help in some cases!

First you will have to get the necessary packages. On a Debian system you will need to install:

• Scribus 1.4RC5
• texlive and textlive-lang-arabic

Now, you can follow this thread in the Q&A site for TeX and Latex:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8476/scribus-arabic

The steps are quite easy:

First add the support for Arabic text to the document embedded by typing the following command in the Fonts/Headers tab

\usepackage{arabtex}
\usepackage{utf8}

Then put the Arabic text in the "Code" field. Since i have no -- really no! -- knowledge of Arabic, I took a post from another thread about this same topic (I checked with an automatic translator: it should be something related to this topic!):

\begin{arabtex}
\setcode{utf8}
\setarab
\RL{ ... put your text here ... }
\end{arabtex}

And this is what it will look like:

I can only hope that the result is somehow correct... and i hope that the space at the top right corner is an indent and not a rendering error!