Mac Word and Arabic?

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Level 1

62 points

Mac Word and Arabic?

Hi,

I recently bought a Powerbook G4 this summer, and along with it I installed Microsoft's Office Student/Teacher Edition. Unfortunately, I cannot type in Arabic properly (letters do not connect) like I could on my old PC in Word. I contacted Microsoft they said that the reason it doesn't work is because of a lack of an Arabic Dictionary in the software. Does anyone even knows what that means? Basically my question is what additional software do I need to type in Arabic properly with Word on my PowerBookG4? Thanks for any help.

Tomes

Posted on Nov 11, 2005 6:33 PM

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Answer 1

CK NYC

Level 1

19 points

Nov 11, 2005 7:09 PM in response to Tomio Toyama

Tomio,

I've written texts in Arabic using TextEdit, having all the letters connect properly and all that.
I have Arabic as one of the languages installed on the machine (System Preferences / International / Language tab) and both Arabic & Arabic-Qwerty checked in the Input tab. I also have the Keyboard viewer active as well the "Show input menu in menu bar" checked (all of this is in System Preferences / International)
I found out that having the Keyboard layout on the screen when typing arabic using a Qwerty keyboard is very helpful (Shift, Option give you extra letters)

Hope this helps

-CK
PS: tried to type Arabic in Word 2004 but got the same problem as you. And no clue where to get an Arabic dictionnary from

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Nov 11, 2005 7:18 PM in response to Tomio Toyama

MS Office for Mac simply does not yet support Arabic. What they might have meant by "lack of an Arabic Dictionary" I can't imagine. To do Arabic in OS X use TextEdit, Nisus Writer Express, Mellel, AbiWord, or NeoOffice/J. Most users think Mellel is the best.

NeoOffice/J may be a good substitute for MS Office. There is no way to "fix" Office. You just have to hope that the next version will support Arabic. I think Keynote may be able to do Arabic presentations.

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Answer 3

Tomio Toyama Author

Level 1

62 points

Nov 11, 2005 7:18 PM in response to CK NYC

CK,

Thanks.
How do you pull up the Arabic Keyboard lay out when typing?

My only gripe is Text-Edit is so limited. I used to be able to Power Points in Arabic for classes and do very neat things with the Arabic in word. Now in Text-Edit you have to mess around with alot of options to get the same results. As far as presentations go with Arabic it's nearly impossible. Well, if you hear anything about how to "fix" it please let me know. I'll do the same.
Thanks
مع السلامة
Tomes

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Answer 4

CK NYC

Level 1

19 points

Nov 11, 2005 8:09 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Just tested: Pages & Keynote DO support Arabic.

I did only some basic entry and did not test exhaustively but letters did connect correctly.

As for the Keyboard Viewer, once you have it checked in System Preferences/International/Input and checked also "Show input menu in menu bar", then you will have a flag in the top-right part of the screen. The pull down menu under the flag wil allow you to:
1/ select the keyoard layout you want (Arabic Qwerty for example)
2/ Show the Keyboard viewer

Question: now how did you get arabic letters in your post? I tried but they only show as "??????"

Cheers
CK

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Nov 11, 2005 9:12 PM in response to CK NYC

I think Pages has a lot of bugs that make direct input and editing any substantial Arabic text impractical, though copy/paste works ok.

To write/read Arabic in the forums, you need to switch Safari in View > Text Encoding to UTF-8.

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