Arabic-L:GEN:Arabic on Mac

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 08 Apr 2008
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Arabic on Mac

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1)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From:Knut S. Vikør" <knut.vikor at ahkr.uib.no>
Subject:Arabic on Mac

I just joined the list today, but there seem already to be issues  
relating to my Arabic Mac interest...

The colleague had got it almost right, but just mixed up the culprit...

The attitude reported is that of Microsoft, not Apple. The reason is  
that Microsoft Office for Mac is to be as compatible as possible with  
Office for Windows. Support for Arabic is handled differently on the  
Mac and on Windows, so for Microsoft to support Arabic (and Hebrew) on  
the Mac, they would have to change that code element in Office, which  
would make it less compatible with its own Windows product. That could  
be done, but they made a choice several years ago (one must assume  
based on size of market base) that this was too costly, as they would  
then have to re-do it for every upgrade, and have refrained from doing  
so. It is part of the same calculation that stops them from supporting  
macros in the new Word 2008 for Mac: It can be done, but it is too  
costly, so they are not doing it.

For the technically minded, there was a small Catch-22 involved. Both  
Mac and Windows accept a type of fonts called OpenType. The element of  
OpenType that handles Arabic context analysis is something called  
Uniscribe, which was developed by Microsoft (which also made the  
OpenType system). But uniscribe did not do context analysis under the  
Mac system - and since it was Microsoft that owns and developed it,  
there was nothing Apple could do except to sit quietly and wait for  
Microsoft to upgrade this tool so that Apple also could use it... For  
this reason, Apple developed its own Arabic fonts, using a separate  
technology, and could not use the Arabic OpenType fonts you find on  
the Internet (Mellel and InDesign can, but that is because they  
developed in-house OpenType solutions, or hacks to be precise).

This last explains Dil's point 6, by the way: The font that wrecks  
Safari is Microsoft "Times New Roman", which the installer puts  
instead of the older Apple version of the same font. Apple's Times NR  
does not have Arabic characters. Microsoft's does, but it is an  
OpenType font. SO, before, when a web page with Arabic text asks for  
display in Times New Roman, Safari did not find any Arabic in that  
font, and substituted a real Apple Arabic font instead. Now, with the  
Microsoft Times NR installed, Safari *does* find Arabic characters in  
the requested font, and displays them. But since Times NR is an  
OpenType font, they cannot display as ligatures, only as separate  
characters.

In the latest Mac OS, 10.5, Apple finally has got support for Arabic  
OpenType fonts, I do not know yet if this is because Microsoft has  
relented and upgraded uniscribe, or whether Apple has made its own  
parallel hacks to handle them. But, as far as I have seen (I haven't  
upgraded to 10.5 / Word 2008 myself yet), Word still does not handle  
Arabic, so there were also other problems involved.

Knut S. Vikør
(not a computer person, this is just an interest)

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