How can I get Arabic fonts on my Mac?

Your Mac already has Arabic fonts. To type Arabic, you need to activate an Arabic keyboard layout in system prefs/ language and text/ input sources.

Ms word for Mac has never supported Arabic. Pages has bugs that make it unsuitable for most people. The best app is Mellel, others that work ok are TextEdit , nisus riter, and OpenOffice.

Fonts don't really matter for this. Go back to the Input Sources tab and make sure you have checked the boxes for Keyboard Viewer and for Show Input Menu in Menu Bar. Then choose Arabic in the "flag" menu at the top right of the screen and type. An Arabic font is automatically used.

Select Keyboard Viewer to see which key does what.

If you need to see all the fonts that contain Arabic, do Edit > Special Characters and click on the gear wheel at the top left and select customize. Then check the box for Arabic and select a character and you can see all the fonts that have it.

pminister wrote:

Is there a way to type where the letter(s) join, to create one word as a traditional writing sense. Versus individual characters. Thanks

Yes, use any other app except MS Word. After 14 years still cannot do Arabic. Mellel is best, but TextEdit, Pages 5, Nisus Writer, Open/LibreOffice should all work OK.

First off thanks for the above tip. It helped.

Is there a way to type where the letter(s) join, to create one word as a traditional writing sense. Versus individual characters. Thanks