Arabic-L:GEN:computer question responses

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Sat 17 Aug 2008
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:computer question response
1) Subject:computer question response

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1)
Date: 17 Aug 2008
From:Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer at gmail.com>
Subject:computer question response

mbooth at illinois.edu wrote:
> Also, I have a computer question: my son is about to start an  
> undergraduate
> Arabic major (hurrah!), and I'm wondering what laptop to buy him.  
> I'm a PC
> user; he's interested in Mac but I've heard that present Arabic  
> capabilities
> on Mac aren't so great (though I know they used to be the best). Any  
> advice?

One thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft Word for Mac doesn't
support Arabic at all.  For this reason, my wife uses NeoOffice
(http://www.neooffice.org) instead of Word on her Mac laptop, and that
seems to be OK.  NeoOffice is a Mac version of the free OpenOffice
productivity suite (http://www.openoffice.org/), which runs on several
different operating systems.

My laptop runs Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/), a free
community-developed operating system that includes OpenOffice; it
supports Arabic very well.  A number of companies (e.g. Dell and Acer)
sell laptops with Linux pre-installed.

> Dear colleagues -- Is anyone familiar with the font interface  
> between the
> latest version of Wordperfect and arabic to english transliteration  
> letters
> such as `ayn, hamza, and the letters like d and h that sometimes
> need a period below them)? Jaghbub, which I've installed for my latest
> version of MS Word, doesn't seem to be accessible for Wordperfect.

Any good Unicode font for European languages should have those
characters.  I often use Gentium, a free font:

http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium

If you can't find a way to type those letters on the keyboard, you
might try copying them and pasting them from this web page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_31635

Ben

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2)
Date: 17 Aug 2008
From:Knut S. Vikør <knut.vikor at ahkr.uib.no>
Subject:computer question response


> Also, I have a computer question: my son is about to start an  
> undergraduate Arabic major (hurrah!), and I'm wondering what laptop  
> to buy him. I'm a PC user; he's interested in Mac but I've heard  
> that present Arabic capabilities on Mac aren't so great (though I  
> know they used to be the best). Any advice?

Arabic capabilities on the Mac are fine, it is the Arabic capabilities  
of Microsoft Word on Mac that are not fine (do not exist). But there  
are many other excellent word processors fully Arabic capable (and all  
read and write Microsoft Word files, if collaboration with PCs is an  
issue). So go ahead with the Mac choice, if that is what he is  
interested in - a fine machine.

> Dear colleagues -- Is anyone familiar with the font interface  
> between the latest version of Wordperfect and arabic to english  
> transliteration letters such as `ayn, hamza, and the letters like d  
> and h that sometimes
> need a period below them)? Jaghbub, which I've installed for my  
> latest version of MS Word, doesn't seem to be accessible for  
> Wordperfect. (I looked in the "symbols" tab.) I'm looking for the  
> Times or Times New Roman font or something close for these  
> particular letters. Is there a way to make a keyboard do this in WP?  
> The internet has been no help.
> Thanks. Frances Hasso

Does WordPerfect support Unicode (e.g., can you write macrons over a  
and u etc. in Times New Roman?) I do not know anything about WP these  
days, but Jaghbub for Unicode (called "JaghbUni"), which I made, does  
- as the name implies - require that the application supports Unicode  
fonts. The old version of Jaghbub (called just thus) is a Mac font and  
is not intended for PCs.
For an overview of Unicode fonts for Arabic transliteration (PC/Mac)  
see,
http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv/diacs.html#ucf
but technically they are all Unicode fonts, so either none or all will  
be useful for WordPerfect, depending on the application's abilities.

Knut S. Vikør

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