[Tex/LaTex] how to insert arabic glyphs in pdflatex

Question

I'm trying to create an English document using pdflatex and want to insert a few cyrillic and arabic glyphs.

something like

the letter Я is cyrillic, whereas ش is arabic

I tried to follow advice found Inserting some Arabic script in an English article, but it seems that xetex and pdflatex are mutually exclusive.

my feeble attempts until now look like:

\documentclass[letterpaper, 12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A,LAE]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian,USenglish,arabic]{babel}
\begin{document}
the letter Я is Cyrillic, whereas ﺵ is arabic
\end{document}

any hints how to achieve this?

Answer 1

You have to properly mark the parts where different scripts are used; this works, for instance:

\documentclass[letterpaper, 12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A,LAE,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian,arabic,USenglish]{babel}

\begin{document}
the letter \foreignlanguage{russian}{Я} is Cyrillic,
whereas \foreignlanguage{arabic}{و} is arabic

\end{document}