Displaying Arabic Text in Entourage 2008 & Office 2008

[timvnelson]

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?

[fangpyre]

I don't think there is a workaround for Entourage.
Entourage 2004 has even less Arabic support.

All in all, you are better using Mail than Entourage.
Entourage seems a little more mature from some aspects.

However, it is a more stable platform.
And Entourage uses a database method where all your mail is in one big file.
This is both dangerous and heavy on the system,and it is an easy way to fill up your disks if you use TimeMachine. If you have a 2-3 GB mail database, it will be backed up (or at least triggered) every mail you get.

As for Excel it works ok with Arabic. The only problem is that it doesn't support RTL sheets (the text inside the cells is displayed correctly).

Apple iWorks is a good platform (410 Dhs).
It has amazing graphics capabilities.
However, Pages (the word processor) is not very strong, and Numbers (the spreadsheet) is different with some advanced features missing.
If all you need is basic writing and simple formulas, it will work fine.

NeoOffice (free) How can you beat that?
It is amazingly strong, and its free!
There are some features that are missing.
And you have to turn it on (for example by loading the word processor) before you can choose which application you want.
But the good thing is that you set it to save in a default format (I use Office's) for your files.
This makes sharing files a lot easier.
Did I mention that its free?

[timvnelson]

Thank you for your thorough response.

I am especially glad that you addressed the ability to save files in a default format, such as Word. When working with Microsoft Office for Windows users, that is a nice feature to have. When using iWork's Pages, having to maintain both a filename.pages document and a filename.doc is an extra step that I try to avoid.

Here are some more questions that fangpyre's post brings to mind as well as some more thoughts after spending hours reading all of the other great posts on this web site.

1. Does anyone have any experience on how well .doc files created from NeoOffice, Mellel, or Nissus open on Microsoft Office for Windows?

2. Does anyone have any updated information or comparisons on using Mozilla Thunderbird vs. Apple Mail 3.2 (in Leopard)?

Thanks.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Originally Posted by timvnelson

1. Does anyone have any experience on how well .doc files created from NeoOffice, Mellel, or Nissus open on Microsoft Office for Windows?

Nisus and Mellel can produce .doc as you have stated. I have opened such files in Macintosh before and haven't shared them with Widnows as far as I can remember. I have used the import filter in Adobe InDesign to import such files, it worked fine as if I was importing a genuine MS Word document.

Originally Posted by timvnelson

2. Does anyone have any updated information or comparisons on using Mozilla Thunderbird vs. Apple Mail 3.2 (in Leopard)?

Once again, I used to use Netscape then Thunderbird for a number of years, they used to handle incoming and created Arabic messages 90% accurately. I just switched to Mail recently when I upgraded my Mac to Leopard.
Apple's Mail handle Arabic much better than Thunderbird, but I miss many non-language related powerful features that where available in Netscape and Thunderbird.

[timvnelson]

Zaid AL Hilali-

I appreciate your response and I'm glad to hear that Apple Mail works well with Arabic text. As much as possible I try and stick with Apple technologies, because they do such a fine job of making their software work well together.

When testing the abilities of Entourage 2008 and Apple Mail 3.2, I found it very frustrating that Entourage 2008, could not open email sent from another Microsoft email client (Outlook and Outlook Express). I was shocked that Apple Mail displayed the Arab text without any problems.

Thank you for your help.

[DXB Law]

Originally Posted by timvnelson

Thank you for your thorough response.

I am especially glad that you addressed the ability to save files in a default format, such as Word. When working with Microsoft Office for Windows users, that is a nice feature to have. When using iWork's Pages, having to maintain both a filename.pages document and a filename.doc is an extra step that I try to avoid.

Here are some more questions that fangpyre's post brings to mind as well as some more thoughts after spending hours reading all of the other great posts on this web site.

1. Does anyone have any experience on how well .doc files created from NeoOffice, Mellel, or Nissus open on Microsoft Office for Windows?

2. Does anyone have any updated information or comparisons on using Mozilla Thunderbird vs. Apple Mail 3.2 (in Leopard)?

Thanks.

I have used Nisus to exchange Arabic-only or bilingual docs with Windows users. This creates formatting problems basically because Nisus and MS Word for Windows interpret the RTL command differently. (Text that looks fine in Nisus may appear left-justified or otherwise improperly formatted in MS Word, and vice versa). Also, the typical way of formatting a bilingual doc in Word (using tables with the Arabic in the cells on the right and the English in the cells on the left) creates problems. At least in older versions of Nisus, the table formatting doesn't render cleanly when you reopen in Word, and vice versa. That said, Nisus is a good program -- very intuitive and easy to use -- and I will report back on compatibility issues after working a bit with the latest version.

Mellel I find very difficult to use, at least if you are used to the commands and concepts used in MS Word.

My solution is that I run MS Office for Windows on my Mac via Parallels and I deal with Arabic documents in a Windows environment.

[timvnelson]

This is great! I am getting every issue addressed in such a specific manner. That would be great if you let me know how the files created in the latest version of Nisus open in MS Office in the Windows environment.

I have seen documents created in MS Word for Windows that have two tables, English on one side and Arabic on the other. Is that the most the most common standard for creating bilingual Arabic / English documents in MS Word for Windows?

[DXB Law]

Originally Posted by timvnelson

This is great! I am getting every issue addressed in such a specific manner. That would be great if you let me know how the files created in the latest version of Nisus open in MS Office in the Windows environment.

I have seen documents created in MS Word for Windows that have two tables, English on one side and Arabic on the other. Is that the most the most common standard for creating bilingual Arabic / English documents in MS Word for Windows?

This is the only way I know of for keeping the English paragraphs lined up with the Arabic paragraphs.

FYI -- MS Word for Windows does not deal well with Arabic numbers. (By this I mean for example ٣ not 3). You now see numerals represented almost universally in Latin characters. But if you create your numerals on the Mac via Nisus or something else, they will render correctly in MS Word for Windows (and your Windows friends will ask you how you managed to do that . . . )

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Originally Posted by DXB Law

My solution is that I run MS Office for Windows on my Mac via Parallels and I deal with Arabic documents in a Windows environment.

I shall try this also. Thanks for these tips DXB Law