Arabic-L:GEN:Getting Arabic to appear in Arabic-L messages

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 21 Mar 2007
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Getting Arabic to appear in Arabic-L messages

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 21 Mar 2007
From:moderator
Subject:Getting Arabic to appear in Arabic-L messages

I have received several requests for help from those who aren't  
getting the Arabic script part of Arabic-L messages.  I have spent  
another morning with the list administrator trying to understand the  
issues and how they might be solved.  Here is what he thinks is  
happening:

1) the messages are sent to me in all kinds of character coding:  
unicode, windows, who knows what else.

2) my Mac, being relatively smart, just goes ahead and figures out  
what they are and displays them correctly, so I can't tell that they  
are actually encoded differently from each other.

3) so if I just copy the message and send it out, the server thinks  
that everything unusual is unicode, and if it happens not to be that,  
it turns to garbage. (except that sometimes the original message  
Arabic is such an unusual encoding that my Mac can't figure it out  
either, and in that case all even I can see is garbage, in which case  
it is guaranteed that if I send it out it will be garbage as well.)

4) however, if I go ahead and copy the message (with the readable  
Arabic script) into my mac text editor and specifically save it as  
unicode, and then copy it back in, it supposedly gets sent out  
correctly as unicode text.

5) However, apparently, this server sends everything out in html  
format, i.e. surrounded by tags that tell the e-mail program how to  
interpret things.  Supposedly, one of the things it tells your e-mail  
program, when there is script, is what encoding it should use.

6) So, supposedly, as long as you are using an e-mail program that  
correctly interprets the html, and is set to interpret html, it  
should have the information it needs to display the message  
correctly.  If you are using Windows and have not installed the  
Arabic language resources, you may need to do that for this to happen.

7) He suggests the following to check this out:  a) determine if you  
can get most Arabic language websites with correct looking Arabic.   
b) if so, with a browser (Firefox is best), go to listserv.byu.edu ,  
log in with the e-mail address to which you are subscribed to Arabic- 
L (if you haven't already established an Arabic-L password, you would  
have to do that with the appropriate button), and then click on  
Online Mailing List Archives.  In the list the comes up, click on  
Arabic-L and scroll through the current month's messages (or search  
with a keyword) until you find a message that you know has Arabic  
script in it (one, for example, that showed up as garbage on your e- 
mail program).  Open that message in the server and determine if the  
script comes through fine there.  If it does, then, according to my  
guy, the message is fine, and your computer is set fine to show  
Arabic script, and can and does show it, so the problem is in the way  
your e-mail program is set up.  So that is where you might either  
need to look through the settings, or get some computer savvy person  
to help you.

8) I somehow doubt things are all that simple (was that simple?), but  
if this helps anyone, could you let me know?  I am going to type a  
line of Arabic at the end of this message so that those who see  
garbage there will have something to check it out on. If worse comes  
to worse, you could read most messages on your e-mail program, but  
when you come to one where you really want to be able to read the  
Arabic script, you could log in to the listserv website, find the  
message, and read it there.  In general, as well, I would encourage  
people sending messages to provide transliteration when they are  
using a small amount of script in their message.  I know this is  
harder when there is more than a small amount.

Thanks,
Dil

إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون.

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End of Arabic-L:  21 Mar 2007
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