Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 45 Location: Le Mans, France
Posted: Mon Nov 29, 2004 9:19 am Post subject:
Try the latest AbiWord 2.2 you could be surprised.
I had to open texts with column from Word.
On the left, the Text in English, on the right, the text in Arabic.
Well in Office 2004, the format from word windows is well respected but impossible to read the Arabic, the characters are not displayed.
In NeoOffice or OOo 1.1.3 X11, the presentation is not respected at all, I have 3 pages instead of 2 I have text only on the second one.
In AbiWord, I have exatly the text I should have.
i downloaded AbiWord (Mac OS X verisin) from versiontracker. It doesn't handle arabic or my Uyghur fonts at all. Even when I click on the right to left, etc., AbiWord doesn't work.
I started this topic with a question about "how" to get Arabic working. For those who report that an application IS working, it would be greatly appreciated if you could provide some details about how you got it to work.
I downloaded also the AbiWord 2.2, but no luck with making it work. Sure, it outputs arabic letters when I choose my Arabic unicode keyboard and font, but after that the options seem endless. Do I choose "Force LTR" under the Standard Toolbox? Do I make the default document setting left-to-right? Do I do even something as arcane as choosing the appropriate font BEFORE choosing the keyboard?
Or did you simply download, install, and voila, Arabic working! ?
If so, may I buy your magical computer!
I use Mellel to type Uyghur, which is modified Arabic script. Mellel handles it as well as Arabic flawlessly. I'm able to use Windows and Apple fonts with no problem, as long as they are Unicode.
I was hoping that OOj would handle Arabic, but I have the same problem as mentioned previously with letters not connecting. While Mellel is a nice little multi-lingual word processor designed for Mac, I would much rather use the more full featured OO.
I meant to reply specifically to your post earlier but got distracted....
Note that Mellel either has its own text engine with more advanced OT support or uses some complex form of contextual analysis to join charcters and doesn't use font instructions at all (the former, iirc).
OOo/X11 uses FreeType to draw its text, and FreeType uses the latter method for the Arabic script (iirc). If you really want to use OOo and need to use Windows Arabic fonts, you can do that with OOo for Mac OS X. On the other hand, you lose all the nice native things about Neo/J (which works fine with Apple's Arabic fonts--or other Arabic fonts with AAT instructions, if there are such fonts!) and get stuck with the poor rendering of the stock FreeType (even the patched FreeType isn't great compared to "native" OS X font rendering).
The real solution IMHO is for Apple to improve its OpenType support, and then Neo/J and all other Mac apps (TextEdit, etc.) that use Apple's text engine will be able to join Arabic letters when using Windows OT fonts. I've already sent feedback to Apple about it, but the more feedback, the more likely Apple will act It's an OS X bug
I have found an update of Abiword, maybe the bug of Arabic has been corrected since they say it has an enahnced right-to-left languages support.
Well, it is "enhanced," but it's not fixed In unvowled texts, most letters join in most fonts, but there are still lots of bugs (taa marbuta, for instance, doesn't join at all), tons of redraw issues, etc. OOo/Neo are light years ahead in their RTL handling code.
Let me repeat what I said earlier in this thread: the real solution to our Arabic font problems is to bug Apple to 1) add more glyphs to its Arabic fonts so that they support all the letters needed for working in `ajami langauges and 2) add full OpenType support to the OS so that we can use Windows Arabic-script OpenType fonts (that's what most of the recent fonts are) with larger numbers of glyphs for non-Arabic Arabic-script langauges and have the letters be joined properly.
Ensuring Apple does these two things means that 1) we'll not have to depend on a small number of apps that write their own text engines and include Arabic support (Mellel, being from an RTL location, has handled it pretty well, OOo/X11 is middle-of-the-road (missing out on native font support, anti-aliasing, etc.), but AbiWord is the other end of the spectrum right now) to greater or lesser degrees of success, and 2) perhaps more importantly every OS X app will have full support for fonts needed for all Arabic script languages without having to write a new text engine...imagine making graphics with text in Fulfulde in GraphicConverter, for instance!
Smokey
(who is in a foul mood--pardon the rant-y nature of the post--because he spent all afternoon readying food for a holiday party whose date was changed and because the Firefox folks broke Single Window mode in Camino and he's getting new window spawned all over the place--and who is tired )
I don't know for Arabic, but what I have seen in Abiword is that complex MS word documents are better handled under Abiword than OpenOffice actually, nothing to compare. I had a text with paragraphes with columns and others without, some others with 3, OOo wasn't able to open my doc correctly, some apges were simply missing, I had white pages, so OOo is not an alternative for me at the moment if it can't do that while Abiword can simply do it natively.
So even if OOo has a better Arabic support, Abiword is better, so if the give a better right-to-left language support, it will be a real alternative under Mac OS X.
And also, Abiword is native under OS X and really faster than OOo X11 or NeoOffice.
SIL released two AAT TrueType fonts for Arabic script languages earlier this month (to clearly far too little fanfare, since I just discovered it today), covering the entire Arabic and Arabic Supplement Unicode blocks! Apparently not many ligatures and no presentation forms, but at least these should cover all Arabic script letters in current use--and hey, the dagger alif works! Instead of glyph variants, one font tailored for Arabic and the other tailored for the languages using the eastern script variants....
(There are also OpenType versions in case you need to exchange documents with Windows and Linux users.)
And now I also have a new gripe about Apple's font substitution routines, which prefer TITUS Cyberbit [which is not an AAT font and thus doesn't join] and the Chinese ST* fonts [which contain only presentation forms and also don't join] to another AAT Arabic font containing the needed glyph! Grr!
And, on Arabic generally, Patrick has fixed OOo's kashida support for Neo/J since we last posted in this thread...now if I could only figure out how to make those "columns" for poetry and get those to be justified....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 45 Location: Le Mans, France
Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2005 11:00 am Post subject:
Good news for Arabic users, Apple has listened to us and improved Arabic support under Mac OS X 10.4
I have tried it fastly and it is now possible to write right to left jutified text. Another reason to use NeoOffice, Word under Tiger still doesn't support Arabic and NeoOffice lauch is twice faster on my iMac !
I have tried it fastly and it is now possible to write right to left jutified text. Another reason to use NeoOffice, Word under Tiger still doesn't support Arabic and NeoOffice lauch is twice faster on my iMac !
FYI. Justified Arabic text support was added to Neo/J for all Mac OS X version by some fixes that I made in one of the last few Neo/J RC patches.
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 45 Location: Le Mans, France
Posted: Sat Jul 23, 2005 11:29 am Post subject:
yes I know that, but I was speaking about built-in Arabic support in Mac OS X.
That means that Pages can now writes Arabic better. _________________ iMac G5 20" 1,8 Ghz Mac OS X 10.4.8
MacBook Pro C2D 17" 2,33 Ghz Mac OS X 10.4.11
yes I know that, but I was speaking about built-in Arabic support in Mac OS X.
That means that Pages can now writes Arabic better.
You could always do justified text under Mac OS X in WorldText; it's a matter of application support, not OS support. I played around with it in WorldText under 10.3.9 when I was helping Patrick debug the bugs in OOo's kashida routines.
Since Pages is a pseudo-DTP app, it makes sense for Apple to add kashida support. If they've added it to all their other apps, too, that's certainly good news!
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
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It's an OS X bug 
