Arabic letters not connecting

mishmish · Red Pill Joined: Oct 01, 2009 Posts: 9

Greetings! It seems as though my Arabic letters have decided to stop connecting to one another-- problem is, it seems very haphazard. Sometimes they connect, sometimes they don't-- sometimes the non-connection is egregious, sometimes it isn't.

I have attached a file with examples highlighted. I am a teacher, so I have to be precise in my typing-- can anyone help?

I am on a MacBook Pro 2.6 GHz 4GB Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OSX 10.6.4, running NeoOffice 3.1.1. Patch 1.

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

What I think is happening is that the NeoOffice code or its underlying OpenOffice.org code are widening the space allocated for some of the Arabic characters. Since Arabic characters need to be drawn right next to each other to make them appear "connected", a widening of space allocated to a character will leave a gap after the character.

I will investigate this further and see I can fix this problem. When I have a fix (hopefully in the next few days), I will post a test patch with the fix for you try.

Patrick

mishmish · Red Pill Joined: Oct 01, 2009 Posts: 9

Thanks so much for looking into this. My fingers are crossed!

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I have some more information. The problem is occurring only with the Geeza Pro font on Mac OS X 10.6.x Snow Leopard. This problem does not occur with other Arabic fonts or with the Geeza Pro font on Mac OS X 10.4.11.

While you may think you are using the Tahoma font, you are actually using the Geeza Pro font for Arabic characters. The reason is that many fonts made for Western European languages like Tahoma, Times New Roman, etc. do not support other languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese so NeoOffice uses the Geeza Pro font as a "fallback font".

While I still need to find out why Snow Leopard's Geeza Pro font is not rendering like earlier versions of Mac OS X, there is a workaround that you can use: set your Arabic text to use the Nadeem, Baghdad, or Al Bayan,fonts as those fonts support Arabic characters and, as a result, will not have this problem.

Patrick

mishmish · Red Pill Joined: Oct 01, 2009 Posts: 9

Changing the font definitely worked, so I'll just run with that for now. It's strange that something so minor went hinky during the shift from 10.4 to 10.6. I puzzled over this for weeks before contacting you, but I never once thought to do something like change the font! (Obvi...)

Good luck figuring out the rest of the puzzle! Wink

narf · The Anomaly Joined: Jan 21, 2007 Posts: 1075

I have submitted bug 3621 to track this issue.

Fran

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I think that I have fixed this bug. Interestingly, I found that on Snow Leopard the Arabic vowel marks are assigned a negative width so I changed the NeoOffice code to handle such cases.

Can you install the following test patch and tell us if the bug is fixed for you?:

Intel:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.1.1-Patch-1-Test-17-Intel.dmg

PowerPC:
http://joe.neooffice.org/test/NeoOffice-3.1.1-Patch-1-Test-17-PowerPC.dmg

Patrick

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. I have included the fix in NeoOffice 3.1.1 Patch 2. The patch can be downloaded from the NeoOffice patch download page.

Patrick

mishmish · Red Pill Joined: Oct 01, 2009 Posts: 9

Hi Patrick,

Sorry for the delay in responding-- school was out and I had some scuba diving to do! Very Happy

I've since DL'ed and installed the new patch, and so far everything seems to be working great. Many thanks for your help yet again... I push NeoOffice with my students because it is, IMHO, the best program for working with Arabic. And it's all thanks to you!

ألف شكر

(A thousand thanks!)

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. The fix for this bug has been included in NeoOffice 3.1.2 which can download it from the NeoOffice download page.

Patrick