Arabic-L:GEN:Arabic Browsing on Mac OS X

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 05 Dec 2002
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1) Subject:Arabic Browsing on Mac OS X

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1)
Date:  05 Dec 2002
From: Michael Fishbein <fishbein at humnet.ucla.edu>
Subject:Arabic Browsing on Mac OS X

A question about Arabic browsers for OS X. Knut Vikør, at his Arabic
Mac Website (http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/i/smi/ksv/arabnet.html), says
that Netscape 7 works as an Arabic browser. Following his advice, and
also realizing that Apple is phasing out System 9, I asked our
university  technicians to install Netscape 7 (and Mozilla for good
measure) on their OS X machines and then try to read the Arabic page
of the BBC's World Service (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/) . Both
browsers managed to read the Arabic as Arabic, but there were serious
rendering problems. Any completely disjunct letter (e.g. a
nonconnector after another nonconnector or after a word break, or any
final letter after a nonconnector) came out smaller in size and
lighter in color. The problem occurred on the screen and in printing.
The result was text that, while it was readable, looked very strange.
Interline spacing, too, was not correct in some layouts. With these
defects or bugs, Netscape 7 in its present state is not a
satisfactory Arabic browser for OS X. Exactly the same problems
occurred in Mozilla.

We were unable to determine why the problem occurred. The individual
glyphs for the disjunct letters in the font itself (Lucida Grande, a
unicode font) did not seem to be at fault: they were neither light
nor small. Something else is causing the difficulty. Whether it is
due to Netscape (or Mozilla -- both use the same rendering engine) or
is due to a bug in System X, we don't know. Anyone have any idea?

The OS X machines on which we did the experiment did not have Arabic
language resources installed under System 9.2. I wonder whether this
had anything to do with the problem. Has anyone out there tried the
same experiment with Netscape 7 on a machine with OS 9's Arabic
resources installed, either running only OS 9.2, or running an OS 9
box within System X?

We tried tinkering with every conceivable preference, to no avail.

Alas, iCab, which works so nicely as an Arabic-enabled browser under
System 8.6 and 9.x, seems to have lost its ability to handle Arabic
in its OS X version.

As for Internet Explorer, which works beautifully for Arabic under
Windows, its Mac version does not as far as I know support Arabic.

The question has practical implications for Mac users, as Apple is
shipping all new computers with OS X. Unless we can use a new Mac for
Arabic word processing and accessing the web, we may -- perish the
thought -- have to go over to Windows machines.

--
Michael Fishbein, Undergraduate Advisor
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
UCLA

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End of Arabic-L:  05 Dec 2002