I try to create a bilingual document in English with parts in Persian and want to use babel (please do not suggest using polyglossia instead, since I want to use a more complex document class and polyglossia seems to break it).
It works fine with pdflatex if I just use common Persian characters (this snippet compiles fine with pdflatex and displays correctly):
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[LAE,LFE,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[farsi,english]{babel}
\begin{document}
\begin{otherlanguage}{farsi}
سلام
% خانوادهٔ من
\end{otherlanguage}
\end{document}
When I uncomment the second Persian line I get problems with pdflatex because of the Arabic Hamza.
! LaTeX Error: Unicode character ٔ (U+0654) not set up for use with LaTeX.
I also tried compiling with xelatex but have other problems with that. Although it compiles neither of the Persian lines is displayed and I get a bunch of warnings regarding the fonts:
LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape 'LAE/lmr/m/n' undefined using 'LAE/cmr/m/n' instead on input line 133.
Missing character: There is no خ ("62E) in font nazli!
(one warning for each character)
LaTeX Font Warning: Some font shapes were not available, defaults substituted.
The Nazli font is the default font for Persian/Arabic and shouldn't have a problem with the characters that I used.
I tried setting up different fonts with the \babelfont command when using xelatex but that did not yield different results.
Am I missing something?
I can reproduce the error with pdftex, but I’m not sure why it happens. With xetex, the setup is quite different:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[bidi=bidi, english]{babel}
\babelprovide[import=fa]{farsi}
\babelfont[farsi]{rm}{Nazli.ttf}
\begin{document}
\begin{otherlanguage}{farsi}
سلام خانوادهٔ من
\end{otherlanguage}
\end{document}