How to use Arabic in Pages?

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Level 1

8 points

How to use Arabic in Pages?

Problem relating to copy and pasting Arabic text...

I have a PDF that's Arabic, when I copy and paste into Pages it comes out as gibberish (not Arabic characters). I have the standard Arabic fonts that come with Mac OS, and have been able to copy and paste Arabic text before but it's not working now.

What am I doing wrong? Is there some special way of dealing with non-western fonts that I'm missing?

Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jan 19, 2011 12:32 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,848 points

Jan 19, 2011 12:43 PM in response to NW5586

Copy/pasting from non-latin pdf is not reliable, there are all kinds of ways it could have been encoded.

But more importantly, all iWork apps have various bugs that make them unsuitable for Arabic for most purposes, even when you can get Arabic characters. Instead you should use Mellel (the best), or TextEdit, OpenOffice, Nisus Writer, or iText. (MS Word for Mac does not do Arabic either).

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Answer 2

Jan 19, 2011 5:52 PM in response to NW5586

It is possible that you do not have the fonts used in the actual PDF and/or that the author has not used Unicode fonts. Older Mac systems and older Windows PCs used specially encoded fonts which will not translate.

You can find out what the fonts used were if you have Adobe Acrobat, by going to the document properties.

Peter

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