According to information on this page, removing these fonts, or replacing them with the original versions installed by OS X, will solve the problem. It worked perfectly for me.
[robg adds: I haven't confirmed this one.]
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I have been often frustrated by Safari's apparent inability to display Arabic web sites correctly, whereby Arabic words are displayed as single characters without ligatures. It turns out that this behavior has something to do with defective versions of Times New Roman and Arial fonts belonging to Microsoft Office.
According to information on this page, removing these fonts, or replacing them with the original versions installed by OS X, will solve the problem. It worked perfectly for me. [robg adds: I haven't confirmed this one.]
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Display Arabic correctly In Safari
The referenced web site correctly explains that those fonts installed by Office are by no means defective; it's OS X which still got some blanks to fill in its OpenType support, and by removing the fonts and returning to the very limited copies supplied with OS X, which do not contain Arabic support at all, you are simply making Safari drop back to use another font which does -- and uses Apple's own AAT technology instead of OpenType.
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
The site clearly states:
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Huh? Where did you copy that?
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Yes, OS X does not fully support OpenType, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Once again we have a conflict between Apple's superior method of doing something and the de facto (i.e. Micro$oft) "standard". Apple's AAT technology for non-Western complex scripts (wherein fonts include everything necessary to form things like Arabic ligatures) gives developers and users complete control over adding such scripts to their computers, while OpenType only works if the OS (i.e. Windoze) includes features necessary for it to work. Thus Micro$oft decides whether your minority script is "worthy" of being used on your computer. Apple may well be persuaded eventually to join the herd, but it will be a loss for Mac users. See here for one story of how Apple's recent attempts to make OpenType work in OS X have torpedoed efforts of one developer to make a cross-platform system for one "minority" script that Micro$oft has not yet "blessed" (but that works fine in OS X).
Other Fonts Too
As one may imagine, this issue was discovered and solved back in May 2004, when Mac Office 2004 came out with those fonts. But it never hurts to repeat it. There are a few other fonts which are commonly seen in Arabic sites .css which Mac users may have on their machine which will cause the same problem in Safari. These are mentioned in the Browser Issues section of this FAQ for the Apple Forums:
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/TypingArabic.html
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
We have a lot more on various issues of Arabic and Mac on our site at http://www.emiratesmac.com.com.
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
The quote is midway down on this page: http://www.hf-fak.uib.no/institutter/smi/ksv/ArabicProgsx.html
Duplicate Hint
I posted the same exact hint a while ago.
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
And for web developers: you simply may want to ensure you list some Safari compatible fonts first in your CSS. Like: font-family: 'Arabic Transparent', 'Geeza Pro';
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
...and, again for the web developers: you may want to compare the output of Safari with some other browsers. As I don't read Arabic, and the pages looked Arabic to me, it took me some time to see that the rendering was actually quite different!
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
I happened to have quoted part of that article that now seems to have vanished from the net:
Display Arabic correctly In Safari
The article as referred to in the hint has moved to Arabic fonts for the Mac - further detail. As a side note: even in 2009's Snow Leopard there's still Unicode rendering issues for some fonts (at least for Trebuchet MS). See How do I create Unicode smilies like ٩(•̮̮̃•̃)۶ at Super User (and, be sure to compare your browser's output to the image in one of the answers). |
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