Arabic on MS Word?

[mahmood]

Hello guys,

I've switched to Mac for a week now and have already gotten used to it. Still have some time to learn more things about this brilliant OS as I was a pretty advanced Windows user, so the transition was a bit harder for me to make.

I've looked through the threads, so I apologize if there is already a thread on this, but I didn't see any. I noticed a lot of people have problems reading Arabic on Safari, which isn't a problem for me at all...

I have some documents that I need to read, but MS Word wont let me read Arabic. It has the font set at "Arabic Transparent" which I don't think I have on the Mac.



However, being a new user, I was wondering if anyone encountered such problems and what they did to fix them? If I found the font and dragged it to (Library>Fonts>Microsoft) would this solve the problem?

Any form of assistance would be greatly appreciated.


Mahmood

[fangpyre]

Welcome to the site and the Mac world Mahmood.

This has been discussed before on the site.
So you can go back and read more if you wish.

But the short of it is this.
Microsoft Office:Mac doesn't support Arabic.
Period.

Solutions?
- Open Office.org
- Run MS Office from Windows using any of the Windows techniques.

If you really need the extensive use of MS Words features in Arabic, then run it via Windows. If all you need is basic Arabic editing then use OOo, its very good for most usage, but not as strong as MS Word.

If all you need to do is view the files, then all you need to do is select the file you want to view in finder and push Space (this starts Quick View).

As for the font.
Keep it, but move it into the Fonts folder.
To install fonts, all you have to do is double click on it, and then confirm you want it installed.

[mahmood]

Thanks a lot. I've heard about OpenOffice before but never considered it.

What I really wanted to do most importantly was view the file, didn't realise QuickView would open up the text in Arabic as well.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

beside what fangpyre have suggested, you can open an Arabic Word document in the free and simple "Text Edit" applications or in Nisus, or Mellel which you need to purchase if necessary, both are powerful multilingual word processors for Mac.

[hakkerz]

beside what fangpyre have suggested, you can open an Arabic Word document in the free and simple "Text Edit" applications or in Nisus, or Mellel which you need to purchase if necessary, both are powerful multilingual word processors for Mac.

I am actually having a similar problem! Open Office worked for me! Thanx!! I cant get the arabic to work with PhotoShop though ...anybody know a fix?