Dear Arab friends;
I am an Iranian Mac user who speak and read arabic but do not write Arabic properly. That's why I am writing to you in English and not in Arabic.
As you all know from Mac OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) Arabic/Persian support was added to the operational system. But this support is so poor that is more or less useless in Arabic script text processing. Unfortunately we, who are dependent on Right-to-left computing (Arabs, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu etc) has been very passive in perusing Apple Computer to live up to our computational needs. We just wait until something is done by Apple, if not we do not show any reaction to show Apple that there are demands from their middle east user.
I hereby urge you all who visit this nice site to send mail to Apple and tell them about all bugs and shortages in current version of OSX. To tell and ask them that wee need a decent document processor, an Arabic compatible AppleWork, that iPhoto, iMovie etc should support Arabic.
I have found the following bugs/problems in the OSX version 10.2.5 which I have reported to Apple. I urge you all to do the same. The more people that let Apple know about these bugs the more is the chance that these get fixed in the coming version of OSX.
Best Regards to all Arabic friends
Mac OSX system
1- In the international preference pane "Right-to-left" should be added to the script behavior. This is important to make it possible to Right align the text in the dialog boxes etc.
2- Even it should be possible to choose "Indic digits" as a default character in preference pane.
3- Arabic and Persian date and time should be possible to set, as this was possible in OS9.
4- iPhoto and iMovie dose not accept and displays Arabic/Persian. They do not not support ATSUI but ASCI text
TextEdit
1- Arabic/Persian text are typed overlapped.
2- Kashida justification (which is the basic feature of Arabic/Persian script) is not supported.
3- Combining Arabic/Persian text with Roman text in the same line is not possible. This make the Arabic/Persian support useless.
4- cursor jumps around from the first character in the line to the one being typed. Cursor dose not follow the word from Right-to-left as they being typed (Arabic/Persian script)
5- Line spacing dose not work (Arabic/Persian)
6- Punctuation in Arabic/Persian script dose not work.
Font
1- Lucida Grand font
Characters in Arabic script are not proportional. Some letter like HAH 062D, QAF 0642, YEH 064A, NOON 0646 etc are designed so big that that they do not have enough space even the character palette preview windows. In the TextEdit they overlap the characters in the line bellow.
The characters in this font are so big that they are overlapped in character palette.
2- Displaying Arabic/Persian text using STFangsong, STHeiti, STKaiti, STsong, a space is inserted between each character. The distance between the characters is to big to make a conjuncted word
3- All Windows Unicode Fonts like Tahoma dose not displays Arabic/Persian correctly. The characters are displayed unaligned (non conjuncted) to build a word.
4- When typing Arabic/Persian punctuation in the TextEdit, they are inserted in most right side of the page and it is not inserted where they should after Arabic/Persian characters
5- None of the non-Apple Arabic/Persian fonts for OS9 works under OSX (10.2.5) which is a huge lost of investment for us.
6- "Trace of the word" in TextEdit when changing font, text size in Arabic/Persian
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