FYI. Looks like Panther doesn't do diacritics. -Connie
---------- Forwarded message ---------- 1) Date: 05 Oct 2003 From:Frederic Lagrange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic read my article (in French) on Mac OS 10.3 and Arabic at http://www.macgeneration.com/mgnews/categories/en_passant/ en_passant_104030_1.shtml ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- 2) Date: 05 Oct 2003 From:Dil Parkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject:Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and Arabic For those who don't read French, I will summarize the article here. Basically, 10.3 has provided a new Arabic font, Geeza Pro, which becomes the default Arabic font for most Arabic sites, and this has solved the problem of the little tiny independent characters mixed in amongst the bigger connected characters. You can now go to a site like Al-Jazeera using Safari and everything is very readable and normal looking right on the screen. However, Safari has not solve the problem of keeping connected letters connected when there is a vowel mark between them. A vowel still breaks up a word. For many sites this is not a problem, but some papers, like Al-Hayat for example, use vowels more than others. Also, there are some 'literary' and religious sites that use vowels. As Prof. Lagrange points out, if you find something on a site that is heavily vowelled (like lines of poetry) and therefore unreadable, you can copy it into TextEdit and it comes out looking fine. In other words, the 'connecting' problem doesn't seem to be inherent to the system, but just to the program Safari. For example, I found a random paragraph in a random article in Al-Hayat with the word minna 'from us' with a shadda on the nuun. On Safari the nuun and alif were separated because of the shadda, but when I copied the paragraph into textedit, the alif and nuun were connected and it looked great. The article contains several screen shots, so even if you don't read French you might benefit by lookiing at it. By the way, TextEdit still has the punctuation problem that I have mentioned before, but this can be remedied by using Melel, which has both a text alignment and a text direction button. Dil ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- End of Arabic-L: 05 Oct 2003 _______________________________________________ FarsiWeb mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/farsiweb