Abbod wrote:
I have tried TextEdit again. It was fine in writing in arabic using user-installed fonts. However, this app cannot stand in front of Microsoft Word and Pages capabilities.
What features do you need that TextEdit is missing? I may know of other alternatives.
The free trial version of Mellel has to be downloaded from their website instead of the app store.
Unfortunately the bugs in Pages (e.g. broken cursor operation, no setting for direction control, restriction to AAT fonts, no ability to input the ZWJ/ZWNJ characters required for some RTL scripts) have been known for 8 years, and to my knowledge no workarounds have been found other than composing everything in another app and seeing whether copy/paste will give the results you want.
Regarding AAT Arabic fonts, Apple provides a few (Geeza Pro, Al Bayan, Baghdad, Damascus, DecoType Naskh, KufiStandard, Nadeem). Others are (from SIL) Lateef AAT and Scheherazade AAT, and the XW Zar (and perhaps others) fonts available at
http://www.redlers.com/downloadfont.html