Why Arabic doesn't show up properly in Safari?

I notice that your page has a Latin-1 charset and uses NCR's to represent Arabic. The better way to do such things is to use a UTF-8 charset and have the Arabic in its proper code. You might try modifying one page this way to see if that changes the resulting display. If not, it is probably a Safari bug that you should report via Safari > Report Bugs to Apple.

Mac IE can't do complex scripts and is outdated and obsolete for such purposes. Soon it will no longer be available for download from MS either.

PS I did some tests with UTF-8 myself and it appears this erroneous display of final damma is a bug in Safari.

I think they do care. Update 10.4.3 supposedly included fixes to "Improve the handling of Hebrew and Arabic text in Safari and Mail." So a future update may fix this. Try to be as precise as possible in your report.

A kludge work-around is to add an rtl character (like 06D4) after the damma. If only there were an invisible one...

Tom, I see you are an expert on the topic and I hope you, or anyone knowledgable, can help me out. as per the popular suggestion of getting rid of all things "arial" and "times new roman" to fix the safari mess-up, I actually removed every instance of these fonts (with all their possible variations, bold, italic, etc) from all locations, not just the user/lib/fonts location, but to no avail... while my Safari can properly read "some" arabic websites, it scrambles arabic up on most others, Two popular examples would be aljazeera.net and www.alarabiya.net. any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.....

You need to be more precise than "scrambles" about the problem. If it is disconnected letters, then the solution is to remove any Windows Arabic fonts, especially the Arial and Times New Roman installed by Office2004 in Users/username/Library/Fonts. Also Tahoma if you have taken a Windows version of that from somewhere.

If it is a different issue, it is more likely an encoding problem. Try View > Character Encoding = UTF-8 or Windows 1256 or ISO-8859-6.

Send me a screen shot if you like. Click on my name for the address.

Yes, by scrambled I meant disconnected. I tried deleting all the arial, times new roman, and tahoma fonts from my system, but I still can't view certain arabic websites in Safari correctly... any more suggestions?? BTW I e-mailed you a screen shot of a popular website in Safari if u wanted to take a look.... thanks

any more
suggestions??

It has to be a windows font being used in place of Geeza Pro.

BTW I e-mailed you a screen shot of a
popular website in Safari if u wanted to take a
look

Thanks! Not received yet. Tell me the url too.

the URL would be: http://www.alarabiya.net/... this site shows me disconnected letters.

is there anyway I can find out exactly what windows fonts are installed in my machine?? thanks

is there anyway I can find out exactly what windows
fonts are installed in my machine?? thanks

One way is to get rid of any arabic font which is not Geeza Pro. Or get rid of any arabic font in Users/username/Library/Fonts, because that is most likely where it is. Looking at the .css file for that page, it would appear that the fonts you need to get rid of are:

Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Traditional Arabic, Arabic Transparent

Thanks a bunch tom, the culprit indeed were traditional arabic and arabic transparent, i had previously gotten rid of tahoma, arial, and times new roman. the question now remains, are there more arabic fonts for Mac OS X than Geeza Pro?? if it does, where can i find some?? thanks again

See this note:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/Typing%20Arabic.html

thanks a lot. that was very helpful