EmiratesMac - View Single Post - Displaying Arabic Text in Entourage 2008 & Office 2008

timvnelson · 21st March 2008, 08:55

This may be old news to those that frequent this forum. However, recently it was brought to my attention that Arabic text viewed in Entourage 2008 displays properly when sent from the Apple Mail email client, but not from a number of others.

I examined the headers and source of the emails that did not display correctly and realized that the "problem" emails were those sent from Outlook Express 6 or Outlook 10. The headers / source reveal that these email clients encode the Arabic text as charset Windows-1256.

When opening a message that has been encoded with Windows-1256 in Entourage 2008, the Arabic text shows up as question marks. However, when the same message is opened in Apple Mail 3.2 (Leopard) it decodes Windows-1256 just fine.

Because so many people use Outlook and Outlook Express, this obviously a big problem for a Mac user hoping to use Entourage 2008.

This leads me to three questions relating to email:

1. Is there a workaround for Entourage 2008 to read Arabic text sent from Outlook Express or Outlook?

2. Does Entourage 2004 read Arabic text sent from Outlook Express or Outlook?

3. Does everyone using a Mac in an Arab-speaking environment simply use Apple Mail as their Email client?

Then beyond just the email issue, what applications do most people use that need to create mixed English / Arabic text documents? TextEdit, Pages, Mellel, Nisus Writer? What about for an Excel equivalent?

21st March 2008, 08:55	#1 (permalink)
timvnelson Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Los Angeles, California - USA Posts: 8	Displaying Arabic Text in Entourage 2008 & Office 2008 This may be old news to those that frequent this forum. However, recently it was brought to my attention that Arabic text viewed in Entourage 2008 displays properly when sent from the Apple Mail email client, but not from a number of others. I examined the headers and source of the emails that did not display correctly and realized that the "problem" emails were those sent from Outlook Express 6 or Outlook 10. The headers / source reveal that these email clients encode the Arabic text as charset Windows-1256. When opening a message that has been encoded with Windows-1256 in Entourage 2008, the Arabic text shows up as question marks. However, when the same message is opened in Apple Mail 3.2 (Leopard) it decodes Windows-1256 just fine. Because so many people use Outlook and Outlook Express, this obviously a big problem for a Mac user hoping to use Entourage 2008. This leads me to three questions relating to email: 1. Is there a workaround for Entourage 2008 to read Arabic text sent from Outlook Express or Outlook? 2. Does Entourage 2004 read Arabic text sent from Outlook Express or Outlook? 3. Does everyone using a Mac in an Arab-speaking environment simply use Apple Mail as their Email client? Then beyond just the email issue, what applications do most people use that need to create mixed English / Arabic text documents? TextEdit, Pages, Mellel, Nisus Writer? What about for an Excel equivalent?