Arabic language problem

Hi PureHeartKnight;

Word is a Microsoft Product and you will probably have to ask over there.

Allan

Word does not support Arabic. I don't do much better so I can't answer any questions about Arabic support in Pages. By all accounts, the best bidirectional word processor is Mellel.

PS: I tried to actually run Pages and test, but I seem to have lost my serial number so it won't even run.

OK. I found my serial number. Yes, Pages ('08 at least) seems to have serious problems with Arabic. Ironically, TextEdit handles it just fine.

does snow leopard have any problem with Arabic language cause i noticed strange behavior with word the letters are not linked together every letter alone

Right, MS Word for OS X has never yet supported Arabic (or any Indic language either).

in pages its fine but the cursor don't move between letters and when i type it stays at beginning of the line although i can type why is that happening ?

Because, while Pages does support Arabic (and also Indic), it has various bugs which make it unsuitable for RTL scripts for most people (unless copy/paste from elsewhere is enough). Same for Keynote and Numbers and iWeb.

Use instead Mellel, TextEdit, Nisus Writer, OpenOffice, etc.

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

Pages can handle it. The problem simply lies with the font. If you select some text and change the font to a standard Arabic one like Al Bayan. You will notice it will fix it self.

It is most likely you are getting documents written on MS Word with the standard Times New Roman font and on Windows that comes with Arabic support.

but i cant understand how simple software such as text edit handles arabic better then pages 🙂

We are all mystified why Apple has failed to bring Pages up to the level of TextEdit in the RTL area.

Pages can handle it. The problem simply lies with the font. If you select some text and change the font to a standard Arabic one like Al Bayan. You will notice it will fix it self.

You have misread the problems described by the original poster. The disconnected letters are in MS Word. There is no way to fix that by changing the font. The Pages problem is " the cursor don't move between letters and when i type it stays at beginning of the line". There is no way to fix that by changing the font.

Yes, Nisus writer is excellent.

I would still like to see localization to the OS to support Arabic though.

and microsoft is being lazy, they won't support Arabic/Hebrew on the Mac