Arabic support and compatibility

I've seen posts from Thomas Gewecke stating that Apple Pages can't compose Arabic.

While Pages, Keynote, and iWeb have cursor and formatting bugs that make Arabic composition impractical for most people, these apps do display the correct ligatures and contextual forms. Word for Mac's inability to do that is what people mean when they say this app "does not support Arabic." You seem to be talking about something else. Millions of people use the normal fonts supplied with Windows and Mac to compose and display correct Arabic documents, webpages, and emails, either Unicode or the older ISO-8859-6, without problems using all kinds of apps.

MS Word for Mac has been very slow in matching the ability of other apps to handle Unicode and complex scripts, but presumably it will eventually do so, regardless of anything related to pdf or postscript.

PS The graphic below of the Arabic word for "Arabic" illustrates MS Word for Mac's non-support of Arabic compared to that of all other apps, including Pages. As I understand the problem, MS does not think using Apple's system text engine will provide the desired level of compatibilty with Arabic text produced by Word for Windows, and thus needs to program its own engine, like the app Mellel has. It's a big, expensive project which in the end will probably not offer MS a lot of commercial benefit. So it has not gone quickly. Office components PowerPoint and Exchange do not have the same compatibility requirements, and they can do correct Arabic using Apple's text engine.

As I understand the problem, MS does not think using Apple's system text engine will provide the desired level of compatibilty with Arabic text produced by Word for Windows, and thus needs to program its own engine, like the app Mellel has.

If you are saying that the paradigm of one character maps to one and only one glyph is not the underlying problem for Arabic, then that assessment would be wrong.

If you are saying that an application has been slow to move to drawing glyph codes that are not directly depicted onto character codes, then you will have no argument from me.

/hh

The Pages application from Apple is useful for creating text in Arabic script, despite the limitations in handling mixed left-to-right and right-to-left conventions. However, it completely fails when it converts the document into PDF. What is shown in the Pages document is perfect Arabic script, but after conversion to a PDF this is all lost and replaced by other symbols. Is there any workaround? Does Apple intend to fix this bug?

What is shown in the Pages document is perfect Arabic script, but after conversion to a PDF this is all lost and replaced by other symbols.

I can't duplicate your problem and have not seen it reported anywhere else. What font are you using? I'd be interested in seeing one of your pdf's if you want to email it to me (tom at bluesky dot org).