Arabic support and compatibility

Alawi,

Pages does right to left but has other issues which make it unsuitable, it places the cursor in the wrong position in the text.

Mellel:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8712/mellel

Is by far the best option on the Mac,

Peter

help us,,,

Mac OS X 10.6 scheduled for September 2009 should see this situation solved.

/hh

we can't deal with Arabic files that transfer from windows PCs or written by Microsoft Office,,,

If you are having problems reading the content of ordinary text files, it could be they are using a Windows Arabic encoding instead of the standard Unicode. You can try opening them with TextEdit in plain text mode with the encoding set to Arabic (Windows, Dos, or ISO).

For MS Word files, I would try both TextEdit and OpenOffice. Make sure your font is set to Geeza Pro.

There's never any guarantee that MS Office formatting will be reproduced exactly when opened by apps other than MS Office, whatever the language. Unfortunately MS Office for Mac does not do Arabic.

Feel free to send me a copy of a file you are having problems with and I can see whether there is a solution (tom at bluesky dot org).

In neooffice files are work but they appear in irregular format and different font

As I suggested, try OpenOffice and TextEdit as well. Normally Macs cannot use Windows Arabic fonts and can only display with Geeza Pro or other Mac Arabic fonts. But TextEdit can use Windows Arabic fonts sometimes.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/TypingArabic.html

Alawi,

Microsoft uses its own technology for using and displaying right to left text, which works quite well in MsWord for Windows. This is of course not available on the Mac.

Unfortunately, nine years after OSX was released, Apple is still fixing this problem. Let's hope as Henrik says that Mac OSX 10.6 solves the problem.

Peter

There's never any guarantee that MS Office formatting will be reproduced exactly when opened by apps other than MS Office, whatever the language.

Ouch, there's a misconception from the previous thread 'Apple Advanced Typography for the writing systems of world scripts' in the Pages ´08 section of the forum.

The drawing model for composition on which Apple and Microsoft have agreed is that Unicode encodes content and only content while TrueType encodes appearance.

Mathematically, if the drawing model for composition can draw a glyph design if and only if its glyph code is directly depicted onto a character code, there are two options.

One option is to swell the character codes in the coded character set, causing rampant redundancy. Before searching, spelling, sorting the character synonyms have to be disambiguated.

This option led to the Arabic Presentation Forms block of ISO-IEC 10646/Unicode which allows minimal Arabic writing with obsolete drawing models for composition.

The other option is to draw glyph designs by depicted their glyph codes onto incorrect public character codes, which if memory serves has been done by e.g. QuarkXPress for Arabic.

In the Unicode/TrueType model each font file is free to add appearance features as the type designer sees fit, and the font file stays on the author's computer.

The exception to this is if editable embedding is enabled in the TrueType font file in which case the font file travels inside Microsoft Word and is installed wherever the Microsoft Word file is opened (editable embedding uses the FSTYPE switch in the grabbag OS/2 table of the TrueType Specification, http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6OS2.html).

Because type is software and because software is subject to licencing, there is never any guarantee that Microsoft Word documents will look the same on any two digital graphic displays, unless either Microsoft-bundled font files are used or the author and her audience own the same font licences. The more complex the script, the more costly the type, and the more costly the type, the more complex the problem of configuring appearance for compatible assumptions.

Hope this helps (was writing up the developer discussions through the week).

/hh

I don't know why microsoft don't support arabic in mac office

Don't worry, it's not about Apple or Microsoft, it's about the underlying font machinery in PostScript and PDF which dominated and dictated the Desktop Publishing period. The font machinery in PostScript and PDF is good enough for high value newspaper composition in the Latin script, but it is not good enough for low value monolingual composition in the Latin script, say comparable to the quality of composition in metal at Cambridge University Press or Oxford University Press in the 1960s. Also, if you try to set ligatures, small capitals, lower case numbers and more then even classic English composition becomes unsearchable. It isn't primarily that Arabic is a problem, it is primarily that the drawing model for composition and the document model for pagination are no good even to English, Danish, French, German ...

/hh

For:

not good enough for low value monolingual composition in the Latin script

Read:

not good enough for low value academic monolingual composition in the Latin script

The sin of speed typing, again -:).

/hh

I don't know why microsoft don't support arabic in mac office

Don't worry, it's not about Apple or Microsoft, it's about the underlying font machinery in PostScript and PDF which dominated and dictated the Desktop Publishing period.

The failure of MS Word for Mac to correctly display Arabic (or Hebrew or Devanagari) has nothing at all to do with PDF or postscript. It's simply a matter of the programmers not doing the necessary work yet, with no doubt some disagreement between MS and Apple on where some of the burdens lie. Some parts of Office 2008 for Mac, namely PowerPoint and Exchange, do in fact now support Arabic, I believe.

The failure of MS Word for Mac to correctly display Arabic (or Hebrew or Devanagari) has nothing at all to do with PDF or postscript.

If this is private opinion, then no problem. If this is technical information, then please provide technical discussion and reference to technical documentation. From 1989 through to 2009, Apple and Microsoft have maintained that PostScript is the problem.

/hh

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:

From 1989 through to 2009, Apple and Microsoft have maintained that PostScript is the problem.

I can see that some kind of postscript might be a problem, but I cannot see how the problem could be so complicated that it would take 20 years to make an OS available for hundreds of millions of potential users.

Do you happen to have any more details about exactly what might be difficult to solve in PS?

Do you happen to have any more details

You mean a book by a body? For a broad discussion of how the font program dictionary machinery in PostScript works, Dr Yannis Haralambous' introduction to fonts and encodings is available in French and English. For particular problems, if memory serves some have been discussed on this forum since the turn of 2008.

/hh

From 1989 through to 2009, Apple and Microsoft have maintained that PostScript is the problem.

Could you provide a reference for that? After all, just about the only modern app for either Windows or Mac which cannot display Arabic with the required ligatures and contextual forms is MS Word for Mac. I would like to understand how "postscript" could make this impossible in that one app but not cause a problem for any of the countless others.

Could you provide a reference for that?

I've provided references time and time again. A drawing model which as per ISO-IEC Technical Report 15285 can be called a character-coded font model cannot compose Arabic, let alone Latin to the level of Monotype metal composition at Cambridge University Press or Oxford University Press.

After all, just about the only modern app for either Windows or Mac which cannot display Arabic with the required ligatures and contextual forms is MS Word for Mac.

I've seen posts from Thomas Gewecke stating that Apple Pages can't compose Arabic. Which, although in preparing this post I cannot see the rest of this thread, also from memory is what the original poster asked about.

Come on, the world isn't flat.

/hh