Arabic Font Library

[Jarrell Campbell]

itried to create a template through Adobe Animate and export it to CasperCG, however, if i write in Arabic, nothing is shown, i can see the animation, but not the text inside, while when i try the English text, it works

There are two things to note here: 1st You need to make sure that the font you embeed in your template accually supports Arabic and 2nd: That you embedd also the arabic glyphs. Then it works like a charm.

My arabic templates are all copyright protected, so I should not give them out. But I can guide you a bit: If you right click in Animates library pane you can create a new Font. Then a dialog opens where you can select the font and style to embedd:

The Parola library has an arabic font you can use to scroll messages. Link to the library is in my signature block below. There was also some discussion in the main Parola discussion thread some time ago (LED matrix display - MD_Parola, MD_MAX72xx and MD_MAXPanel - Exhibition / Gallery - Arduino Forum).

There is a complication with Arabic fonts in that, unlike Roman letters, Arabic letters should be joined up to make it stylistically correct for an arabic reader. This is hard to do and particularly hard to do in the limited resolution of the 8x8 LEDs.

marco_c:

There is a complication with Arabic fonts in that, unlike Roman letters, Arabic letters should be joined up to make it stylistically correct for an arabic reader. This is hard to do and particularly hard to do in the limited resolution of the 8x8 LEDs.

Doing a character-at-a-time font is easy - this exists for my Parola library and in many other places. Doing the cursive-thing for an arbitrary phrase is complex. There are whole books devoted to it in a Word Processing context (ie, high res screens).

As I understand it the complexity is that how the characters are joined depends on which characters you are joining (sometimes 2 or 3 characters). For simple things like labels on a dot matrix production printer you would probably use a bitmap that has been preprocessed.

I did some testing, I disabled Geeza pro in Font Book, and automatically OS X made the next available Arabic font the default one. I disable that too and the next available one became the default one, and the fonts were listed alphabetically.

OK, so if I can somehow change the name of Tahoma to some something like AAArabicTahoma so that it becomes the first font that supports arabic I can disable Geeza Pro, and OS X will automatically start using this font.

Tahoma cannot in general be used for Arabic on a Mac, because it uses Windows opentype technology to connect the letters. I think only TextEdit and perhaps Mellel will display it properly. Other apps will not show the different shapes of Arabic characters in medial and final position. That requires the Mac aat technology you find in Geeza Pro and some other fonts.

Thanks Tom, I tested Tahoma in WriteRoom and you are right Tahoma is not recognized, only TextEdit seems to recognize this font. Another font that I like is Arial Unicode MS which works in WriteRoom and I just tested it by disabling Geeza and all the other Arabic fonts above it Arial unicode, and OS X is using it as the default font in Twitter, Stickies, spotlight, chrome, etc. which means its supported by Mac.

So, now I will just have to rename Arial Unicode MS into something like AAArial and that would do the trick. I checked out FontForge but its only offered as source and I am not really that experienced at compiling. FontLab, they probably have some Trial and since I only need to use it once I met get away with that, but which product is it?

Arial Unicode is the same technology as Tahoma and will not work in most apps. If you think it is working in WriteRoom it has simply substituted Geeza Pro or another Apple font instead. If you will make the text size very large you should be able to see that it is not Arial Unicode.

Ya its a simple job to change the font everytime I want to type in Arabic, but this is something that I will be doing every single time on each and every app that I use, so if there is a solution to change the default font, why not use it. And for some apps like Twitter or Chrome, I dont have the option to change the font, hence my only option is to change the default font.

By the way, I think I was wrong, I did not have my OS 7 machine running, but it looks like for me both Tahoma and Arial Unicode now display with connected letters in WriteRoom (though I would still recommend choosing an Apple font).

I was able to achieve what I wanted. A friend of mine had Fontlab studio, and I was able to Modify the Tahoma and Tahoma Bold fonts into AAATahoma and AAATahoma Bold. I had to rename the PostScript name, full name, family and a bunch of other names and now OS X recognises it as a totally different font and there is no conflict with the original Tahoma and Tahoma Bold fonts. I named the files to AAATahoma so that they become the first fonts that support Arabic, like I said earlier OS X resolves to the first font that supports Arabic when Geeza Pro is disabled, and it does that alphabetically.

I have tested it and I haven't had any issues, it works with Safari, Mail, Textedit Wordpress, chrome, twitter, Growl, Spotlight Finder, Dashboard, pretty much every app that I have tried so far.

I don't know if it is legal to modify the name of the fonts, but other than the name I haven't modified anything else, like the copyright information, the owner deisgner etc. and I am only using it for personal use.

Thanks for that info, you have found a trick that can be quite useful for people who want to do that in 10.7. I suspect the main apps which will still not work with Tahoma are Pages and the others in the iWork suite -- will have to test them.

As you know I was able to change the default font and everything has been working fine, however I have noticed that with the Twitter app, whenever there are lots of Arabic tweets to load, the fontd process in activity monitor jumps to 98% CPU for a few seconds and then goes down to 0%, it has also become a bit unresponsice and I am seeing the spinning ball of death more often. I am also using Yorufukurou, another twitter app and haven't had an issue with it either, seems like its only a problem with the way the official Twitter app works. When I reverted back to Geeza Pro as my default font, Twitter app became resposive again.

(2) the link i provided (forum) also contains all required fonts ranges for arabic display. Your font ranges is not correct. The correct ones are below. (Note: you can mix font files to get full range if some characyers are missing from a file)

My problem is, since updating Mac to Ventura the other day some fonts in my Publisher documents are now showing Exclamation mark (!) in front of the name and Font Manager says "Unsupported characters used".

I have read some topics here about the issue, I get an idea what the problem is but can't find solution. Just to mention that before upgrade I absolutely did NOT have that issue.

Now suddenly seems like a lots of my fonts on my computer that I used before are not working properly in Affinity. I would say about 30% of fonts are now showing with Exclamation mark?!?

Any idea why is this happening, are you guys aware of the issue, are you working on an update to rectify this.

The exclamation mark indicates, as the message indicated, that you've used a character that is not present in the font. When you do that, either you'll get a "not found" symbol (often an empty rectangle) or, more usually, the character will be substituted with one from another font you have installed that does contain that character.

Could you copy and paste one of the text boxes that shows the issue into a new document and attach it here? I can check it on MacOS 12 as well as 13 and see if the behaviour is different. But as @walt.farrellhas pointed out, normally when you see this, you need to use a font that does have that character or pick a different but supported character.

Just last week I had something similar. That wasn't on Ventura but on [drum roll] El Capitan, but the basic culprit is usually the same since the early days of Mac OS X:

System font cache corruption

Onyx is a free and reliable software that has a "font cache cleaner": titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

Try that. Make sure to read the instructions and follow the steps exactly.

@walt.farrell thanks for reply. As mentioned I sort of understand what it means, but the thing is we did not have this problem two weeks ago, it only happened after the update. I am looking for solution. Sure I can change the font and use different but that makes it not really a solution because;-

b) all the artworks that are approved by clients that are saved, all of them will have to be re-opened, fonts in question changed and then sent to clients for another approval which is really not something one wants to go into.

I have tried Preferences>Misc>Reset Fonts in Affinity but when pressing the "Reset Fonts" button, nothing happens. Button clicks/blinks, but you don't see it doing anything. It just blinks very quickly and if that is the function that did no change anything. Issue is still here.

That's what I thought. but he says there was no problem before. so I thought he hadn't seen the exclamation mark until updated the Mac.

Affinity does not show the "fallback" fonts on Ventura.

If it's about Latin characters, it's definitely the fallback fonts problem.

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