[Lexicog] Spellchecking Unicode in MS-Office

[al haraka]

Lexicographers,

Please spare me.  Their product is so bad, you cannot even type in Arabic on
Mac versions of Office 2008, and it was not so hot on prior versoins (except
for dictionaries they contracted out to Arab companies, they had no
competence in this regard).  Prior to that, you could not type any Arabic
effectively in Outlook as far back as 2003, and if it did the alignment was
always LTR, no exceptions.  At least Thunderbird gave me an extension to
remedy this problem.

I would like for someone to suggest Arabic extinct.  Moreover, the
government pretends they are interested, and any kind of computational
linguistics project involving Arabic is all the funding rage right now.  So,
Microsoft should be a little embarrassed.  I will begrudgingly admit,
however, I typically load MS core fonts onto my linux distros so websites
are easier on the eyes.

Developing fonts is tremendously difficult (which I had no clue about until
a year or so ago by way of Arabic FOSS translators and programmers), so I am
not surprised Mozilla Foundation et al. have not followed up with some
trendy fonts.

Best,
_AJS

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

>   No, I am not grudgingly admitting it. I finally switched to a Mac this
> year after about 15 years on Windows from 3.1 Japanese to 95 English, etc.;
> it has always been difficult to use foreign languages on Wintel machines.
>
> Japanese has gradually gotten better over the years, but working with it
> and English in Word continues to be a nightmare.
> Based on the Web page you have provided, it appears they are continuing to
> improve. BB
>
> On Nov 14, 2008, at 5:11 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
> Benjamin Barrett wrote:
> > I was surprised at the claim that Word is MS is knowledgeable about
> > internationalization.
>
> Their top-level page on this is
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/default.aspx
>
>
> > While they have grudgingly gotten better over the years
>
> or perhaps people grudgingly admit that they have gotten better...
>
> .
>
>
>
>  
>



-- 
Alexander J. Stein
Cell:  (201)-412-9479
Email: alharaka at gmail.com
Skype: alexander.j.stein
AIM:   elduderino6886
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