Arabic-L:GEN:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac responses
Dilworth Parkinson
DILWORTH_PARKINSON at BYU.EDU
Tue Apr 8 14:50:32 UTC 2008
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Arabic-L: Tue 08 Apr 2008
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-------------------------Directory------------------------------------
1) Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
2) Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
3) Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
4) Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
5) Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
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1)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From:Michael Fishbein <fishbein at humnet.ucla.edu>
Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac
Although Mellel handles Arabic and the vowels very well, and will even
allow the text of a Word document generated on Windows and opened as
blank squares on the Mac to be cut and pasted into Mellel, whereupon
it miraculously turns into Arabic, Mellel does not know how to
position shadda plus another vowel over a consonant; the two overprint
each other, both on the screen and when the file is printed.
I have found a work-around. Unicode includes single glyphs for shadda
plus each of the vowels, and some of the Mac Arabic fonts can access
these glyphs. I suggest putting them into your list of favorites in
Character Palate, so that they are readily accessible. Also, to
facilitate matters, one can type the combinations normally and then do
a global search and replace in Mellel. It works beautifully. Into the
Find box, type shadda and the vowel; in the Replace box insert the
compound glyph from your favorites. One can even turn the search into
a macro. Unfortunately, you cannot use an OR search to include all the
combinations of shadda and a vowel, because the replacement needs to
vary on the basis of what is found.
Put the following compound glyphs into your favorites ). Look under
Unicode Arabic, Arabic Presentation Forms-A, Arabic Presentation Forms-
B), the first number (hex) after Unicode is what you are looking for:
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH FATHA (Unicode FC60, UTF8 EF B1 A0)
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH KASRA (Unicode FC62, UTF8 EF B1 A2)
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH DAMMA (Unicode FC61, UTF8 EF B1 A1)
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH KASRA (Unicode FC62, UTF8 EF B1 A2)
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH DAMMATAN (Unicode FC5E, UTF8 EF B1 9E)
ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH KASRATAN (Unicode FC5F, UTF8 EF B1 9F)
ARABIC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALIF (Unicode 0670, UTF8 D9 B0)
ARABIC LETTER ALIF WASLA (Unicode 0671, UTF8 D9 B1
ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM (Unicode FDF2, UTF8 EF B7 B2)
ARABIC END OF AYAH (Unicode 06DD, UTF8 D8 9D)
ARABIC LIGATURE SALLALLAHOU ALAYHE... (Unicode FDFA, UTF8 EF B7 BA)
Not all the Arabic fonts have all these glyphs. Bayan seems to have
most of them, except for Alif Wasla, which will come out in a
different font (and smaller). I have not located shadda with fathatan.
Michael Fishbein, Lecturer in Arabic
Dept. of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
366 Humanities Building, UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1511
tel. 310 206-2229
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2)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From:Connie Bobroff" <connieb at gmail.com>
Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
This series of Perso-Arabic fonts which can be used on both PC and Mac
can
properly display short vowels and diacritics.
http://wiki.irmug.org/index.php/X_Series_2
I'm sorry I deleted the orignal post(s) on this subject but these
fonts work
perfectly in Mellel and
all Mac applications.
-Connie Bobroff
University of Texas at Austin
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3)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From:"Kevin Burnham" <kburnham at gmail.com>
Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
Hi,
I use Mellel on a MAC with the Scheherazade font and have no trouble
putting
fathas on top of shaddas. I believe it can be downloaded for free from
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ArabicFonts
.
Kevin Burnham
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4)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From: "Waheed Samy" <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
Have you tried different fonts? Under MS-Word the same effect -dot and
diacritic overlap-occurs with certain fonts, such as Arial. However,
if you
select all the text displaying this symptom then change the font to
Simplified Arabic, the display is fine.
Waheed
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5)
Date: 08 Apr 2008
From:"Knut S. Vikør" <knut.vikor at ahkr.uib.no>
Subject:Vowel markings with Mellel on Mac response
In a separate message today, I mentioned a bit about Arabic font
types, and this is related. It is also relevant for complex Latin
diacritics, by the way.
Apple has created a basic, operating system level, way of handling
typography, that is to my eyes very flexible. One element of it, is
that diacritics in either Arabic or Latin are aware of each of other
and can relate to each other: If you have a font that can show both
"dot under" and then "line under", try to type both onto the same
character, in e.g. TextEdit, which uses the system typography resource
only. You will see that the second one you type moves down so that
both are visible. Some Semiticits do use "d with line under and dot
under" for whom this will be useful. Even better, "dot above" over a
lower-case character is placed just above it; over an upper-case
character the same dot moves higher up, and is placed correctly in
relation to, and also centrally placed whether it is a wide W or a
narrow I.
Fine. However, as mentioned in the other mail, this system did not
handle Arabic ligatures in certain fonts (of the OpenType kind). So,
some programs do not use this system-level function, but create their
own. Mellel is one such. It does mean it can use a much greater
variety of Arabic fonts. But it also means that it must forgo this
dynamic placement of diacritics, or recreate the complex typography
behind it by itself. InDesign is a beautiful program, and can do lots
of fine typography, but is unfortunately terribly expensive. Mellel is
affordable, but you get the trade-off.
What to do? Well, what happens is that without these system-based
adjustments, the program uses just what the font itself provides.
Fonts actually do differ on this shadda + vowel combination. Most
fonts will in Mellel do as you say, superimpose them. But a few do
not. Apple's al-Bayan seems actually to work well. So do the two very
nice SIL fonts, Lateef and Scheherazade, and a couple of WinSoft
newest fonts (WinSoft Pro). But these are about it. The very nice set
of Persian fonts available on Mellel's website (the X series),
unfortunately do not [but I believe the producer is actively working
on a new set of more sophisticated fonts which may work better].
Perhaps this will become more automatic in new OS, but since these
finer things are ultimately about development time and costs, there
may always be trade-offs.
(The program Dil does not mention, but which I prefer for Arabic text,
is NisusWriter Pro. Its typography is Apple based, so it has all these
niceties, but it is also as powerful as Mellel or more in terms of
word processing, in my experience.)
Knut
<http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv>
- There is somewhere there a comment about the particular issue of
shadda + kasra, which is an issue apart -
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End of Arabic-L: 08 Apr 2008
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