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Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Authored by: fds on Oct 17, '06 08:08:31AM

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.



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Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Authored by: jfa643 on Oct 17, '06 01:46:34PM

The site clearly states:

"Notice, however, a bug that can cause Safari some problems: When you install Microsoft Office 2004, faulty versions of the fonts Times New Roman and Arial also gets installed. They block Safari's display of Arabic text. Throw these two fonts out (or replace them with older, non-Microsoft versions), and Safari will again display Arabic properly."



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Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Authored by: fds on Oct 17, '06 08:13:36PM

Huh? Where did you copy that?
Here's what the "this page" link says here:

"This, incidentally, is why Safari suddenly stops displaying Arabic properly when you install Microsoft Office 2004: That also installs versions of Arial and Times New Roman that contains Arabic characters, but in OpenType format (as in Windows). Web pages will routinely ask for Times New Roman even for Arabic text, and as it exists on your machine and contains Arabic characters, Safari will go ahead and display those. But because this (Microsoft) font is based on OpenType, the Arabic letters it contains do not combine into words. You must dump the Microsoft version of these two fonts, and replace them with the older, Apple, version of the same fonts, which did not have any Arabic. Safari will then pick another, working, Arabic font to display the text of the website."

And this is correct.



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Display Arabic correctly In Safari
Authored by: HandyMac on Oct 19, '06 05:47:54AM
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).

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Other Fonts Too
Authored by: thg on Oct 19, '06 01:18:32PM
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



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