Arabic-L:GEN:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 05 Oct  2003
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic
2) Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

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1)
Date: 05 Oct  2003
From:Frederic Lagrange <fredlag at noos.fr>
Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

read my article (in French) on Mac OS 10.3 and Arabic at

http://www.macgeneration.com/mgnews/categories/en_passant/
en_passant_104030_1.shtml

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2)
Date: 05 Oct  2003
From:Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic

For those who don't read French, I will summarize the article here.
Basically, 10.3 has provided a new Arabic font, Geeza Pro, which
becomes the default Arabic font for most Arabic sites, and this has
solved the problem of the little tiny independent characters mixed in
amongst the bigger connected characters.  You can now go to a site like
Al-Jazeera using Safari and everything is very readable and normal
looking right on the screen.  However, Safari has not solve the problem
of keeping connected letters connected when there is a vowel mark
between them.  A vowel still breaks up a word.  For many sites this is
not a problem, but some papers, like Al-Hayat for example, use vowels
more than others.  Also, there are some 'literary' and religious sites
that use vowels.  As Prof. Lagrange points out, if you find something
on a site that is heavily vowelled (like lines of poetry) and therefore
unreadable, you can copy it into TextEdit and it comes out looking
fine.  In other words, the 'connecting' problem doesn't seem to be
inherent to the system, but just to the program Safari.  For example, I
found a random paragraph in a random article in Al-Hayat with the word
minna 'from us' with a shadda on the nuun.  On Safari the nuun and alif
were separated because of the shadda, but when I copied the paragraph
into textedit, the alif and nuun were connected and it looked great.
The article contains several screen shots, so even if you don't read
French you might benefit by lookiing at it.
By the way, TextEdit still has the punctuation problem that I have
mentioned before, but this can be remedied by using Melel, which has
both a text alignment and a text direction button.

Dil

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End of Arabic-L:  05 Oct  2003