Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

Arabic

64 views
Skip to first unread message

Brian

unread,
Jun 3, 2003, 12:56:06 PM6/3/03
to
I have been having problems, I have to be able to read Arabic & English
text in word on Mac OS X. I can copy Arabic text from the document
word and paste it in to TextEdit and it looks fine but in word it looks
like "______" I have no idea what I am doing wrong

Also Arabic/Hebrew seems to be greyed out when I switch to word as
well

Bri

Corentin Cras-Méneur

unread,
Jun 3, 2003, 7:50:38 PM6/3/03
to
Brian <br...@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi Brian,


I see two issues here. FIrst, I suspect the font is encoded in Unicode.
Word X does not support Unicode fonts (Win Word does). Beside that, you
need left to right support and I don't think Word does it either.


Corentin
--
- Mac MVP (Francophone) -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?ln=FR&scid=fh;FR;mvp
http://www.microsoft.com/FRANCE/Support/home/Newsgroup.Asp

Brian

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 9:30:48 AM6/4/03
to
cra...@mvps.org (Corentin Cras-Méneur) wrote in message news:<1fvzqrw.fcytjx1u91gsgN%cra...@mvps.org>...

> Brian <br...@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> > I have been having problems, I have to be able to read Arabic & English
> > text in word on Mac OS X. I can copy Arabic text from the document
> > word and paste it in to TextEdit and it looks fine but in word it looks
> > like "______" I have no idea what I am doing wrong
> >
> > Also Arabic/Hebrew seems to be greyed out when I switch to word as
> > well
>
>
> I see two issues here. FIrst, I suspect the font is encoded in Unicode.
> Word X does not support Unicode fonts (Win Word does). Beside that, you
> need left to right support and I don't think Word does it either.
>
>
> Corentin

Thank you

I'm not really worried about writing right to left, as I only need to
display single words, in the same documents. I have Phonetic fonts
which work fine (when I installed them)

The file was made in Arabic word on a PC, all I want to do is view the
file. I don't even need to edit them

Bri

Paul Eedle

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 10:20:23 AM6/4/03
to
Brian

I have exactly the same problem. I'm trying to find a Mac word processor
which will read MS Word documents written in Arabic. If I get anywhere,
I'll let you know. Please tell me if you make any progress, too:)

Paul

Corentin Cras-Méneur

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 11:07:55 AM6/4/03
to
Brian <bria...@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Thank you
>
> I'm not really worried about writing right to left, as I only need to
> display single words, in the same documents. I have Phonetic fonts
> which work fine (when I installed them)

Well, that's a start.

> The file was made in Arabic word on a PC, all I want to do is view the
> file. I don't even need to edit them

THe problem is that this file probably uses arabic fonts unicode
encoded. Mac:Word will not be able to display them at all.
You can ask the files to be saved in .rtf and try to open them with
TextEdit, that might do the trick for you (providing you have unicode
arabic fonts on the Mac).

Paul Eedle

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 11:20:15 AM6/4/03
to
There's a wealth of helpful information about Arabic on the Mac on this
site by Knut Vikør at the University of Bergen:

http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/arabhome.html

It doesn't answer our core question, though, of how to read Arabic MS
Word files on a Mac. I've emailed Knut to ask him.

Paul

Paul Eedle

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 11:30:23 AM6/4/03
to
Here's Knut's suggestion:

I just learned of a nifty, undocumented, way, if you have Word 98 (Mac)
or higher, and Nisus or other Arabic-capable wordprocessor (and Arabic
on the Mac, of course):

Open the Arabic Word/Windows file in Word 98/Mac.
Select the text you assume to be Arabic, and choose an Arabic font for it.
Copy that text and paste into Nisus.

The trick is to change the font while in Word 98. Clearly, it then does
a conversion, although the result still does not display correctly while
in Word. But copied to Nisus it appears as it should.
I just tested this, which I learned on the Nisus list, on a text I am
sure was in Unicode, and it worked. Should also work for older Arabic
Word docs.
Will not work with Word for X in OS X, as it does not recognize any
Arabic fonts, unfortunately.

John McGhie [MVP - Word]

unread,
Jun 4, 2003, 9:53:19 PM6/4/03
to
Great idea from Knut!

That technique would also work using TextEdit.

TextEdit is a Cocoa application that is fully Unicode capable.

Word is a Carbon application, and when it was built, Carbon did not support
Unicode properly.

However, believe it or not, "Word" does support Unicode :-) It's a port
from the PC code which has supported Unicode fully since 1995... they would
have had to do a lot of work to "remove" Unicode supports. Word stores its
files internally in Unicode :-)

So if you change the font to an Arabic font in Word, Word will correctly
encode the characters as Unicode. Then when Word tries to display them, the
CarbonLib it's using won't permit it (the characters will display as
underscores).

However, if you then paste the result into TextEdit, you should be able to
read it.

You should also find that if you save that result out of Word as RTF,
TextEdit will be able to read the RTF version perfectly in Arabic. And if
you save out of Word as a web page AND specify an Encoding of UTF-8,
Internet Explorer should be able to read it too (provided you have the fonts
installed).

Hope this helps

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Wed, 04 Jun 2003
16:30:23 +0100, Paul Eedle <pa...@outtherenews.com>:

All Spam blocked with SpamNet: a free download from http://www.cloudmark.com/

Please post all comments to the newsgroup to maintain the thread.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:jo...@mcghie-information.com.au

Brian

unread,
Jun 5, 2003, 12:35:20 PM6/5/03
to
John you are a god

yes, every thing you said is true or though the web stuff had other
problems (IE and phonetic fonts)

I was just thinking you may know if the apple office apps will work
ie apple works and keynote as all ms applications seem to be letting
us down in Mac OS X

(may not me the best place to ask)

Bri


"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<i48tdvkp2jbb3duk2...@4ax.com>...

John McGhie [MVP - Word]

unread,
Jun 5, 2003, 8:45:25 PM6/5/03
to
Hi Brian:

I think you will find that Keynote has full Unicode. I wouldn't bet my life
on Apple Works. As a rule of thumb, anything developed under Cocoa is
probably going to be fully Unicode, anything developed under Carbon, the
question is which version of Carbon? The Carbon that shipped early didn't
want to know about Unicode: the newer versions are more capable.

And yes, this is really the best place to ask: it's not MS letting you down,
it's Apple :-) (I wish I could resist getting sucked into this
discussion...)

Very simplistically, when OS X was first released, it did not have adequate
Unicode support in Carbon. Microsoft Office was built for the first release
of OS X. Microsoft wanted to hold it waiting for Unicode support: Apple put
MS under severe pressure to ship it in its current state because until
Microsoft had Office on Mac OS X, no other vendor was going to produce any
OS X applications!

Microsoft Office has been fully Unicode since before 1995. It can't be any
other way, because it stores its text in Unicode internally!

But the other problem you have is that your FONTS are not fully Unicode.
Yes, the characters that are there are encoded with the Unicode character
numbers. But a typical Mac font contains only around 260 characters. A PC
font of the same name has at least 1,500 characters.

On the PC, everything falls back to Arial Unicode MS, which has been
specially built to contain every character defined in the Unicode 2
specification (around 32,767 characters...). Such a "font of last resort"
is not available on the Mac.

I feel this probably more than you do: almost all of my work is
cross-platform, and I am thoroughly sick of having to dumb down my documents
to get them to work on the Mac.

But we must all realise that software development is very much "the art of
the possible". Even for a large and rich company like Microsoft, thee are
limits to what it can do with the time, money, and people available. Apple
is doing the best it can: OS 10.2.6 is a much, much improved offering
compared to the 10.0.4 we started with. And Microsoft has already promised
another version of Office for the Mac. I think most folks in here are going
to be very very pleased with the next version.

But not you :-( Last I heard, right-to-left language support was not
available from OS X. So you may have to wait a bit more to be fully happy
with Office on the OS X platform. Me? I happen to know that *I* will have
to wait even longer -- but I will still be racing out to buy the next
version of Office as soon as it hits the store shelves :-)

Hope this helps

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on 5 Jun 2003 09:35:20
-0700, bria...@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk (Brian):

Brian

unread,
Jun 6, 2003, 4:44:29 AM6/6/03
to
John you are a god

yes, every thing you said is true or though the web stuff had other
problems (IE and phonetic fonts)

I was just thinking you may know if the apple office apps will work
ie apple works and keynote as all ms applications seem to be letting
us down in Mac OS X

(may not me the best place to ask)

Bri

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote in message news:<i48tdvkp2jbb3duk2...@4ax.com>...

Gene van Troyer

unread,
Jun 6, 2003, 11:23:06 AM6/6/03
to
On 6/6/03 9:45 AM, in article g5ovdvgtgt9cjj7sc...@4ax.com,

"John McGhie [MVP - Word]" <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au> wrote:

> But not you :-( Last I heard, right-to-left language support was not
> available from OS X. So you may have to wait a bit more to be fully happy
> with Office on the OS X platform. Me? I happen to know that *I* will have
> to wait even longer -- but I will still be racing out to buy the next
> version of Office as soon as it hits the store shelves :-)

Well, maybe the above is not entirely the case. Check out DirectionService:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/18958

This is a Services menu plugin described thus:

With DirectionService you can easily write in Hebrew or mix Hebrew and
English in the same line or paragraph, using applications like TextEdit,
Mail, Keynote, and generally any application that support Unicode and system
services.

Features:

* Start Right to Left or Left to Right writing direction
* End current writing direction and return to the default
* Set the direction of the selected text
* Published under the GNU General Public License

More info in the online user manual, hosted in MacMac, the Hebrew Macintosh
users wiki, and maintained by various contributors:

* English user manual
* Hebrew user manual

If Office apps supported Services (Carbon apps can be written to do so, then
perhaps this could be a solution.

Gene van Troyer

Gene van Troyer

unread,
Jun 6, 2003, 11:27:32 AM6/6/03
to
On 6/4/03 1:56 AM, in article 026301c329f1$060abcd0$a101...@phx.gbl,
"Brian" <br...@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Also Arabic/Hebrew seems to be greyed out when I switch to word as
> well

TextEdit should be able to handle this for you. Also, there is an app called
Mellel:

http://www.redlers.com

It's forté is Hebrew, and it supports bidirectional input at the click of a
button, but if the Arabic Word docs are saved as RTF, it should open them up
just fine.

Cheers,

Gene van Troyer

John McGhie [MVP - Word]

unread,
Jun 7, 2003, 1:08:34 AM6/7/03
to
Gene:

You know anyone who has tried it? This could be a major step forward for
the RTL people, who have been clamouring for support in OS X.

Thanks for posting that

This responds to microsoft.public.mac.office.word on Sat, 07 Jun 2003
00:23:06 +0900, Gene van Troyer <geva...@nirai.ne.jp>:

All Spam blocked with SpamNet: a free download from http://www.cloudmark.com/

0 new messages