Arabic Fonts in Office For Mac

[bolingcs]

I am stationed in Iraq and have to print Arabic documents created in
Word. When I open the files on my Mac, the Arabic fonts change from
initial, medial, final forms to the isolated form changing the meaning
of the translation.
I need a 'language pack' that corrects this problem. I am running
Microsoft Word:Mac ver 11.0 on a Powerbook G4 running Mac OSX 10.4.5
Thanks in advance.
Chris

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Chris,

Sorry. MacWord doesn't support right to left, and there are no language
packs you can add to fix this. This is not a problem with the fonts, I don't
think, but with how Word puts together the characters, so a fix would need
to be in the software itself, deeper than just a different font.

See if Mellel or Nisus Writer Express do what you need--demo versions
available, and there's Word compatibility.
http://www.mellel.com/
http://www.nisus.com/

Best wishes re remaining safe in Iraq.

 

[Michel Bintener]

Or, better yet, try NeoOffice, a Mac OS X port of the free OpenOffice.org
suite. NeoOffice handles right-to-left input, and I have found its Word
document conversion much more reliable and closer to the original than
Mellel or Nisus Writer Express.

That being said, I've never had to open a file with right-to-left writing,
so I can't comment on how well NeoOffice works with those files. Still, it's
free, so you might want to give it a try:

http://www.neooffice.org/

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Chris:

Keep safe over there, mate

I have solved such problems for myself by using the Virtual PC application
you should have found in the box along with your copy of Office 2004.

Since I assume you are working for the government, wander in to the System
Support area and ask to borrow their disk for Microsoft Office for PC. The
usual government/corporate Microsoft Software Licences permit them to
provide you with a copy for your laptop at no extra charge.

I'm on a PowerBook G4 here. The combination of Virtual PC/Windows XP (which
you got with Virtual PC) and Word 2003 will be a bit slow. But I find it
fast enough to use. And it provides perfect compatibility for these cases.

The trick is to map your Mac HDD as a "Drive" in Virtual PC, so you can
open/save your Word documents in either version of Word. Don't save
"anything" inside VPC: not only will you slow the thing down dramatically,
but if anything happens to VPC, you can't retrieve your files using Mac OS.

Couple of tricks for young players:

1) Make sure you have at least a two-button mouse. Word is very
right-click-centric.

2) Do a "Minimal" install of Office. This saves a lot of disk space.

3) Allocate exactly 256 MB as the emulated memory size in VPC. Less, and
XP will run seriously badly. More, and VPC not only takes forever to
start/shut/down, but it also runs VERY slowly.

4) When installing PC Office, make SURE you find and install the Arial
Unicode MS font (they call it the "International Font"). And copy it into
your Mac Fonts folder too.

If you're stuck for a glyph, it's in that font: it is the only font I know
of that contains ALL of the characters in the Unicode 3.4 specification.
OK, it's not a "pretty" font The compromises you have to make to get
32,000 characters into a 22 MB font are considerable. But for one or two
characters it is ideal.

Word on the PC will find and use it automatically. Word 2004 on the Mac
will find it and offer it automatically, but it won't necessarily
automatically "use" it: if you find hollow boxes in a document you may have
to manually correct them to Arial Unicode MS to see the character.

Hope this helps

I am stationed in Iraq and have to print Arabic documents created in
Word. When I open the files on my Mac, the Arabic fonts change from
initial, medial, final forms to the isolated form changing the meaning
of the translation.
I need a 'language pack' that corrects this problem. I am running
Microsoft Word:Mac ver 11.0 on a Powerbook G4 running Mac OSX 10.4.5
Thanks in advance.
Chris

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

3) Allocate exactly 256 MB as the emulated memory size in VPC. Less, and
XP will run seriously badly. More, and VPC not only takes forever to
start/shut/down, but it also runs VERY slowly.

In Windows, in VPC:
Select the My Computer and use a right click to see the options. Go to
the performance tab and make sure the settings applied correspond to max
performances. You can also use the "old" windows 2000 user interface:
it's tremendously faster....

Corentin