Writing and Displaying Arabic with my Mac

[Zaid Al Hilali]

I am testing a some procedure, I hope it will kind of solution to Arabic Mac users. Once tested I will post it on the forum.

[Thair]

If you copy the broken Arabic fonts in Safari & paste into TextEdit, it will be formed properly again.

Sorry, Thair, but I'm not sure what you mean. Fonts are not in Safari or TextEdit, the actual text is. So do you mean copy-past text from Safari to TextEdit? Or do you mean the actual fonts? Sorry to ask, but I just wanted to get it straight ;-)

[Thair]

Sorry, Thair, but I'm not sure what you mean. Fonts are not in Safari or TextEdit, the actual text is. So do you mean copy-past text from Safari to TextEdit? Or do you mean the actual fonts? Sorry to ask, but I just wanted to get it straight ;-)

Sorry I meant copy & paste text from safari into textedit. Sorry for my unclear answer.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Thair, the original post was asking for a way to view web page with an Arabic contents, the original poster installed MS Office and consequently Arabic script started to appear scrambled in Safari.

Your solution could be considered if we have no other way to display Arabic in Safari. Since Safari went through so many modifications and fixes during the past six years, I can say Safari is quite able to read Arabic on most sites if not all but only to remove these two MS funny fonts (Arial/Times) and replace them with original ones.

[elchemor]

exactly, and thats a confirmation on what Ziad is saying, thats an image capture from an arabic webpage which i wasnt able to read the contents before i disabled the 2 MS fonts which were installed with MS Office 2004

[DXB Law]

This thread has confused two different issues.

1) The original poster asked about how to write in Arabic using MS Word for Mac. The answer is it cannot be done. MS Word 2004 for Mac does not support Arabic. Although you can open in MS Word files containing Arabic text created in another application, you will either get gibberish (boxes and lines) or you will get disconnected Arabic letters. You need to use another word processor. There are several; one mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Also Nisus Writer Express, NeoOffice J and Abiword. I personally use Nisus Writer Express (www.nisus.com) for this purpose. It normally saves documents as rtf files; it can import and export to Word format. It also handles the Arabic numerals ????????? which Word in its PC version does not support (that is why you see English numerals in the middle of Arabic documents these days). One problem though -- there is some formatting loss going to/from Nisus -- if you open an Arabic document in a PC version of Word that was generated in Nisus, you may find the text direction of certain paragraphs reversed. To be on the safe side, save the document as a PDF before sending it to a PC user.

2) There is an entirely separate issue about viewing Arabic in Safari. Installing MS Office for Mac also installs Office fonts on your Mac. Two of those fonts (specifically Arial and Times New Roman) will corrupt Safari's ability to display Arabic properly and you will wind up with disjointed Arabic text like ? ? ? instead of ???

To fix this all you need to do is delete the offending fonts from your Mac (go to Library>Preferences>Fonts and simply trash Arial and Times New Roman. Your mac will then revert to using the original versions of those fonts that came with your system -- in other words, you'll still have access to the Arial font in Microsoft Word and other Office apps, but Safari will display Arabic correctly.

No matter what you do with fonts, however, you will not be able to type Arabic in Microsoft Word for Mac until Microsoft provides Right-to-Left support in the Mac version of Office. There are rumors that this might be coming with Office 2007 but they are only rumors.

I hope this helps.

[Magnus]

Slightly off-topic (and old!) but this is an article from 1992 talking about Arabic on Mac.

[DXB Law]

Tom Gewecke's excellent web page entitled "Unleash Your Multilingual Mac" is the latest, and most comprehensive, information on the subject.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html

[brunette96037]

Hi Zaid .. that was really great info!! Thanks alot ;-) . It really worked!! I wouldn't have thought about removing any font to make Safari work in Arabic. Now im so happy, i don't have to use Netscape 7 anymore to view Arabic pages. CooooL

[Uweis]

So I take it Office does not want to change their policies towards right-to-left languages with ligatures (i.e. Arabic). That is a bummer. However, if you want a free wordprocessing program you can use Open Office. It is a free WP that will allow you to properly write and display the Arabic - for the most part.

As for Safari, I just use Firefox or Camino which prides itself as "Mozilla style, Mac power". They both seem to show the Arabic on the websites just fine. I have had no problems thus far.

If anyone hears anything about Office, please tell me!