Arabic-L:GEN:Arabic on Mac OS X

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 09 Jan 2003
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Arabic on Mac OS X

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1)
Date:  09 Jan 2003
From:Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject:Arabic on Mac OS X

For those who haven't heard, Apple has developed a new, free, web
browser for OS 10.2 and up named Safari.  You can download it from the
Apple site.  Good News!  It does Arabic almost acceptably, and pretty
much for the first time readably.  The Mozilla browser also does an
almost credible job displaying Arabic newspaper pages.  The huge
advantage, for me, with the new browser, is that unlike Mozilla you can
copy a web page or part of a web page (command-c), open up Text Edit
(the editor that comes with OS X), paste it in, and it stays Arabic
(and changes to unicode if it isn't already).  In Text Edit, you can
change the font, add or subtract things (like study guide questions,
when preparing an article for use in an Arabic newspaper class), and
print it out nicely.  As usual, there are some problems, but they don't
seem as unsurmountable as they have in the past.  I checked out quite a
few Arabic newspapers, and most came through fine: Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar
(Egypt), Al-Dustour (Jordan), Al-yom and Al-Fajr (Algeria) and Al-Ra'y
Al'aamm (Kuwait).  One other Kuwaiti paper, however, Al-Watan, did not
display correctly at all, and I can't figure out why.
The problem, and this has been pointed out by previous writers, is that
the separate shapes of letters, all those not connected to any other,
are both smaller and less bold than all the other letters.  This gives
a bizarre, almost goofy, look to the text.  However, in the Safari
version the problem seems less drastic than on other browsers in that
it doesn't seem to interfere with readability quite as much.  I assume
this is a font problem  They are using the Arabic parts of Lucida
Grande, and the separates come from an early part of the Unicode chart,
while the connected letters all are grouped together in a much later
section.  Somehow, someone never made sure (apparently) that the early
and later parts of the code chart match in size and boldness.  If
anyone knows who we could talk to about this, let me know.  I can't
imagine it would be that hard to fix, and we need to let them know that
we care; a lot; we want them to fix it.  Why go to all the trouble of
having Arabic display so nicely and then wreck it with this goofiness?
While I'm on this subject, I have a question for the techie.  When I
copy a paragraph from, say, Al-Ahram into text edit, everything is
fine, including punctuation placement.  However, if I type that exact
same paragraph myself into text edit, the final punctuation mark of the
paragraph stays at the beginning of the line instead of the end of it
where it belongs.  It refuses to move to its proper position unless I
type some other unwanted letter (an invisible space doesn't do it).  Is
there some way to get the punctuation placement right with Arabic in
text edit?
The weird thing is that in Indesign ME I can type normally and the
punctuation appears in its appropriate place, but if I type a paragraph
into text edit, save, and then place it into Indesign ME, then Indesign
inherits the punctuation placement problem.  After doing that, when I
type an additional paragraph into Indesign, it now has the punctuation
problem, which thereafter simply refuses to go away unless I quit and
start over with a new file that does not have anything imported from
text edit.  Does anyone know what is going on?
Thanks,
Dil

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End of Arabic-L:  09 Jan 2003