مرØبا arabeyya,
Please read Tom's extremely helpful information referred to in his post; he is the expert on this topic.
I work in a bilingual office environment in the United Arab Emirates and have tried all the word-processing applications mentioned in Tom's note. I have settled on Nisus Writer Express. Although it is not a perfect solution, it is inexpensive, the interface and commands are not that different from what an MS Word user is used to, and Nisus works pretty well most of the time. Whether or not "most of the time" is good enough for you depends on your particular needs and especially the extent to which you need to collaborate with other (PC) users on your Arabic documents.
If you want to be able to read Arabic documents sent to you by others, or type documents for printing out as hard copies (or saving as PDFs) then Nisus or one of the other apps Tom mentions would probably be an excellent solution for you.
Unfortunately in my work I almost always need to send the Arabic document to a PC user in a format that allows for further editing (i.e., a "doc" file not a "PDF"). If you need to do this, then the only perfect solution for now is to boot up in Windows and run MS Word there. It saddens me to say that, because I have been a committed Mac user since 1984, when the Mac software called "Al Katib" was the best way to word-process in Arabic bar none. However, I have had enough experience to know that you will lose formatting going between the PC version of Word and the Mac version of any existing Mac software that supports Arabic.
The problem is that the Mac apps work well enough on their own, but it is difficult to get MS Word for Windows to "play nicely" with them and, unfortunately, this is something largely within Microsoft's control.
Tom probably understands the technical reasons for this, and I don't, but I think Word for Windows handles right-to-left script differently than the Mac apps do. For example, if I generate an Arabic document in Nisus (or in any of the other Mac apps for that matter) it may look nice on screen and print beautifully. But when a PC user opens it up, the paragraph alignment will be wrong (but not in a consistent or predictable way) and numbers will be reversed.
Similarly, when I receive a Word document written in Arabic and open it in Nisus, I normally have to do a "select-all" and change the text direction to "Right to Left" to get it to display properly.
The cross-platform difficulties are worse if you need to do bilingual documents especially half-page with Arabic on one column and English on the other.
That said, Nisus is a very good app (with the added benefit of being inexpensive) if you don't need to send editable documents to PC users (that is if you are able to send your Nisus documents via PDF).
I am really hoping that the next version of MS Office for Mac will support Arabic.
PowerBook G4 (1GB RAM); iMac Intel Core Duo (2GB RAM) Mac OS X (10.4.7)
