Re: copying Arabic into Word document on Mac

In article <8c491$44aacdf7$54497f42$12906@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Stefan <stefan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

huanzuiju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx schrieb:

FYI Word for Mac seems much better for
Chinese/Japanese/Korean than Arabic (though I do know the former
languages and not a word of Arabic...)

The Arabic script is *much* more complex than Chinese/Japanese/Korean.
In the latter three, just use the (complex) signs and the rest is
trivial. Arabic however has simple letters, but they have variations
depending of the context. An arabic script software must recognize the
context and handle those variations authomatically. (Hint: google for
the difference between letter and glyph.) Apple offers this
functionality, but the software must use it.

Not only must the software use it, but the font must have appropriate
AAT tables -- Arabic fonts which use OpenType layout features rather
than AAT features don't appear to work properly in OS X.

For example, if you enter some Arabic text, it will display properly in
Geezah Pro or other OS-X supplied fonts, but it won't display correctly
in, for example, Arial Unicode, despite the fact that all the relevant
glyphs are present.

I haven't used Word in eons, and I rarely have occasion to use Arabic,
but I know that versions of Word running under Classic with the Arabic
language kit installed would get the direction right and the correct
glyph substitutions would be performed, but it appeared that word
calculated all of its line breaks, margins, etc. based on the widths of
the *isolated* forms of the characters. The results were heinous, to say
the least.

André

--
n.b. there are no monotremes in my email address
.

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