Katex: Support for Persian/Arabic Numerals

[omidh28]

KaTeX doesn't support Persian/Arabic numeral. (۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹ )

[sophiebits]

It doesn't look like TeX or LaTeX support these out of the box. Does that agree with your understanding?

[omidh28]

Yes they don't but it's nice to have it.

[kevinbarabash]

@omidh28 what package do you use to get support for these numerals?

[kevinbarabash]

@HosseinAgha has been working on a way to support this in https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX/pull/1269.

[danielhollas]

@kevinbarabash Can I ask what is the status of this now that the #1269 was merged?
In KA we now have some Pashto and Urdu translators who would probably use this in the future.

I am also wondering about the support for Arabic decimal comma ، (U+060C)

EDIT: It seems that the fallback to MathJax works in this case, so I guess this is not as urgent.

[kevinbarabash]

@danielhollas this change was made to support https://github.com/HosseinAgha/persian-katex-plugin. We'll need to update our version KaTeX on khanacademy.org and then figure out how to load persian-katex-plugin along with the necessary fonts. Do Pashto and Urdu use the same script?

[danielhollas]

Do Pashto and Urdu use the same script?

I do not know to be honest. Note, however, that there are different types of eastern arabic numerals as explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals
@HosseinAgha Are all of these supported in your awesome plugin?

In any case, both Urdu and Pashto seem to have a long way to go for their KA DEMO site so I think there is no rush here. I've started to work on supporting these numerals inside Translation Assistant, but for now we can fallback to MathJax anyway.

@kevinbarabash Thanks for a prompt response! :heart: I've added you to a conversation in KA i18n forum in case we needed your insight, but I think we're good for now.