MS Office Mac wreaks havoc with arabic fonts on OSX

Tom - thank you for the useful input and even though Office Mac does not 'damage' the existing font files it does damage my perfectly running setup. the only reason i even install office is to deal with .doc files other people send me since i use other tools to author docs (pages, open office, google, etc) and they dont always render .doc files correctly.

on the point at hand, i did manage to figure something out that seems to have fixed this problem of additional fonts before i checked back and saw all your responses and that was simply to 'trash' a folder in fonts blatantly called 'microsoft'. at least they told me where to find their garbage so i guess they do have a bit of decency left. as soon as i did that my colleagues were able to read the arabic emails i was sending them. i will be further confirming this today and update if need be.

one thing i did try to do but found to be a pain was to go to my time machine backup and figure out what font files the office mac installation had changed in the font folders but realized that the dates were all over the place and there were too many (3 to 5?) font folders on my system. luckily i found the aforementioned 'microsoft' font folder and though to dump it alone.

time machine does not seem to have an easy way to compare previous versions of folders in terms of what contents have changed. that would be a useful feature that i am guessing some enterprising mac developer will come up with at some point.

thanks to everyone else that pitched in as well.

i did suspect that office would be fine if i dumped their proprietary folder. not that i care much about office since i mainly use it to edit and read rather than write.

looks like the 'microsoft' folder didn't do it. im going to have to find a way to go back to the original one.

ok i again think i've resolved this problems by trashing all 'windows truetype fonts' in my main library/fonts folder. so far its worked but what i would rather do is reinstall the pre-office snow leopard fonds. is the only way to extract them from the pkg files in the in install disc as mentioned earlier in this thread?

what about copying the font folders from another snow leopard system?

Tom - i guess i may have not been clear but i was having problems specifically with Arabic in emails or at least where it was most noticeable. it was also pretty strange and i am not sure if i mentioned this earlier but it is only when i reply in arabic to emails that were originally sent in arabic from the original sender (not me). when i send a new email in Arabic and there is a back and forth subsequently on the same thread the Arabic was appearing fine.

since this was a problem only faced after installing MS Office Mac 2008, I managed to trace it back to the bad fonts that were installed by that program that corrupts some of the Apple-installed fonts. MS fonts on Mac are useless anyways since the Mac Office suite does not support Arabic entirely.

so to cut a long story short, the font issue made a mess of email exchanges typed in Arabic and I've just finished restoring my Time Machine backed-up 'fonts' folders (library, user) and hoping that this resolves the issue once and for all.

i pray that we will one day be fully spared the need to even open a word-formatted document and that's the only reason i installed Office Mac in the first place. i am not saying Word shouldn't exist and that's mainly to provide a challenge to Apple and others but i would sure love to forget about it.

tom -

i am not sure of the specifics but here's some info from a poster on a board:

"2) There is an entirely separate issue about viewing Arabic in Safari. Installing MS Office for Mac also installs Office fonts on your Mac. Two of those fonts (specifically Arial and Times New Roman) will corrupt Safari's ability to display Arabic properly and you will wind up with disjointed Arabic text like ? ? ? instead of ???

To fix this all you need to do is delete the offending fonts from your Mac (go to Library>Preferences>Fonts and simply trash Arial and Times New Roman. Your mac will then revert to using the original versions of those fonts that came with your system -- in other words, you'll still have access to the Arial font in Microsoft Word and other Office apps, but Safari will display Arabic correctly."

http://www.emiratesmac.com/forums/arabic/604-writing-displaying-arabic-my-mac-3. html

and there's some useful information here as well http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv/ArabicMac.html .

are there any other font folders that i should time-machine restore besides the two aptly named ones i mentioned in /Library and /user/Library ?

and on a related note, there was an option in the custom settings of the MS Mac Office installation to install 'fonts' (or was it 'additional fonts' ?) that, in hindsight, maybe i should have unchecked. if i ever have to reinstall office one day i will pay more attention to this as well as have my fonts backed up for sure.