I am using the Arabic QUERTY keyboard, and have found alif hamza, but I am struggling with finding how to render fatHA, dhamma, kasra, sukuun, &c.
Can any kind person help ?
Thank you.
MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
MS Word for mac is the only app in the universe which cannot display Arabic correctly.
You should certainly see those two fonts in TextEdit > Format > Font > Show Fonts. How did you install them? Did you restart your machine?
Go to system preferences/language & text/input sources and check the box for Keyboard Viewer. When you have the keyboard in the "flag" menu at the top right of the screen set to Arabic, select Keyboard Viewer in the same menu. You will be able to see which key does what. Press the Shift, Option/alt, and Shift+Option/alt keys to see all the possibilities.
If there is something you still cannot find, just write here again.
That certainly gives me alif hamza, and alif fatHa, but no alif dhamma or kasra, and no other characters with any of those, nor any characters, alif included, with combinations of those diacritics.
Have I misunderstood your instructions ?
Whatever your answer, thank you for coming to my help !
When you do not find on the keyboard a base letter plus diacritic already composed, you simply first type the base letter and then type the diacritic. For alif damma, you type alif (=a) and then type damma (= option/alt + u ).
(Note: MS Word and Pages are not usable for Arabic. The best is Mellel, and TextEdit, Nisus Writer, and OpenOffice should also be OK).
اُ
Thank you, apart from the fact that the diacritics tend to locate themselves somewhat to the left of the character governed by them, instead of above that character, that looks excellent. I am indeed grateful !
paieye wrote:
Thank you, apart from the fact that the diacritics tend to locate themselves somewhat to the left of the character governed by them, instead of above that character
You may need to try different fonts to see which one gives the best diacritic placement. I think two especially good ones are these:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ArabicFonts
I am truly grateful for your help with this.
I have looked at that link, and both of those fonts are a vast improvement on whatever I am now using.
May I just ask, though, since I lack both of those fonts in MS Office for Mac, is there some easy way of adding them to my available fonts ?
Again, a big thank-you.
paieye wrote:
May I just ask, though, since I lack both of those fonts in MS Office for Mac, is there some easy way of adding them to my available fonts ?
Sorry, I don't know why those fonts would not automatically show up in MS Office. Try adding the OpenType version if you have only downloaded the AAT version.
You are not trying to use Word for Mac for Arabic, are you?
paieye wrote:
Yes, I am using it, is that wrong ?
MS Word for Mac does not support correct arabic, normally the letters are not even connected. I mentioned in my earlier post that you should use some other app, like Mellel, TextEdit, Nisus, OpenOffice.
Do you really have connected Arabic letters in Word? I would like to see a screen shot of that (tom at bluesky dot org).
No, the letters are not connected, and that has troubled me. However, when I copy the unconnected letters that I see in MS Word, and paste them into this message, they are connected, as if by magic.
I could certainly use TextEdit, but that also lacks Scherezade and Lateef. I should gladly use any word-processor for this purpose that would be compatible OSX.
I installed Scherezade, then restarted my computer.
I copied-and-pasted the MS Word document into a blank TextEdit document, which I saved in RTF.
The result, without any attempt to change the font from Times New Roman to Scherezade, was perfect.
I am a bit too tired now to work out what is going on, but I do want to pay tribute to your outstandingly helpful contribution to this enquiry -- you deserve a medal.
I am hoping to create an Arabic/English vocabulary in the form of a 3-column table. I can create the table in TextEdit, but cannot at present see any means of sorting the table or of inserting rows
Would I do better with Mellel or 1 of the other word-processors that you mention ?
paieye wrote:
Would that work for me ? My spreadsheet software is AppleWorks, and it seems not to like the Arabic script.
No, Appleworks, like Office X, is pre-Unicode and should not be used for anything other than English these days. I would try the free OpenOffice.
My apology. I am a beginner with Arabic as of 2 months ago, and have not got that quite right. I meant to say that I can render alif fatHa, or alif kasra, but not the other diacritics.
Yes, I am using it, is that wrong ?
Arabic QUERTY Keyboard
