Arabic-L:GEN:Arabic on Mac and Yamil

[Dilworth Parkinson]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Mon 01 Apr 2008
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to
listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
            unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory------------------------------------

1) Subject:Arabic on Mac
2) Subject:Arabic on Mac
3) Subject:Yamil

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 01 Apr 2008
From:"Kamal AlEkhnawy" <kamal19 at aucegypt.edu>
Subject:Arabic on Mac

Dear all,
Since I started using Mac in 1992 to prepare materials for my classes,  
there
has been a problem with Arabic script. If Arabic letters are connected
properly, you may face a problem with the word order.
However, those who have old Mac (bought before 07), they can use "Open
Office" software. It is totally free, and you can download it either  
form
www.OpenOffice.org  or from www.download.com. It allows you use Word and
PowerPoint but may not support all Office product such as Access or  
OneNote.

Those who have new Mac (2007 Mac or later), they can either get Open  
Office
or use Windows operating system and install Office in their Mac. All  
new Mac
computers support dual operating systems: Mac and Windows.
p.s.: all office products are fully Arabic enabled, and some of which  
can be
useful for classroom activities. For example, I've used Office OneNote  
in
some of my classes and found it very useful to engage/challenge my  
class in
integrated interactive drills, i.e., you can ask your students to  
respond,
simultaneously, either by speaking or typing in Arabic while they are
watching a clip.

Cheers,
Kamal AlEkhnawy
Head of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) unit
The American University in Cairo
Kamal19 at aucegypt.edu

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date: 01 Apr 2008
From:"Waheed Samy" <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Arabic on Mac

he trouble with NeoOffice is that it continues (version 2.2.3) not to  
have
a "context" selection for numerals.  As a consequence, if you have mixed
documents, it seems to me to be not possible at this time to show  
Hindi and
Arabic (automatic) numbering at the same time.

Another annoying problem is that the two fonts Simplified Arabic and
Traditional Arabic don't exist on the Mac.  I have not been able to buy
either one.  These two in particular are important because there is  
ample
spacing between dots diacritics.  As a consequence, when I open a Word
document --created under Windows-- on the Mac --under NeoOffice, the
document differs.  Some of my students use Windows, and others Macs.   
Fonts
such as Arial, common on both systems, are not designed for Arabic  
because
dots and diacritics overlap.

A colleague of mine, a computer consultant at the Language Resource  
Center
at Michigan University, told me that the problem with Arabic on  
MSOffice on
the Mac is an Apple problem.  He said that his contacts at Apple have
informed him that they have not found it to be worth their time to  
develop
products for Arabic.  They might in the future, but it's not a priority.

(I have an iPhone.  Apple provides no Arabic for it.  The third-party  
Arabic
for it is atrocious)

Waheed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date: 01 Apr 2008
From:Loren Siebert <loren at siebert.org>
Subject:Arabic on Mac

It doesn't appear as though anyone has mentioned Yamli on this list,  
and as I am having such a good experience with Yamli lately, I thought  
I would mention it on Arabic-L.

First, you can find Yamli here:
	http://www.yamli.com

In short, it enables you to type in transliterated Arabic (e.g.,  
"3rabi, mu2tamar, ...) and have it automatically (or almost  
automatically) transformed into Arabic characters (عربي،  
مؤتمر). For those of you who have an interest in Arabic corpus  
linguistics, you might find the "almost" part interesting, because the  
lookup is essentially doing a form of predictive text input, like  
you'd see on a cell phone, against an Arabic corpus.

Yamli has an API that is in Beta right now, and I found it incredibly  
easy to integrate their input functionality into the writing  
components of LinguaStep, allowing LinguaStep's students and  
instructors the ability to type in Arabic without using a keyboard  
mapping. My users who are already quite comfortable typing natively in  
Arabic don't even notice Yamli, as it only pops up when you type in  
Latin characters.

I've found that LinguaStep users who have avoided these writing  
components for months are suddenly making heavy use of them, and this  
has overcome my initial reluctance to have users create Arabic via  
transliteration. If you have a website that involves user input in  
Arabic, Yamli might be a good fit for your users.

-Loren Siebert
loren at linguastep.com
http://www.linguastep.com
Where students share what they know and learn from others.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L:  01 Apr 2008
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/arabic-l/attachments/20080401/507a8cf6/attachment.htm>