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To use Arabic, you must use (have as active in your Nota Bene file) a Windows Unicode font which supports Arabic. These include Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma, and Courier New. Note, however:
| • | The Arabic glyphs in Arial (a sans-serif typeface) are identical to the Arabic glyphs in Times New Roman (a serif typeface) -- they have "thick and thin" strokes, rather than the more even strokes you find in a modern typeface such as Arial. This means that some people may find a mismatch between Roman Arial and Arabic Arial. If you want a more modern Arabic, you can either (a) use Tahoma as your overall font instead (the Arabic glyphs match the Roman ones -- they have strokes of more uniform width), or else (b) switch into and out of Tahoma when you type in Arabic (this, of course, will be substantially more complicated). Alternatively, (c) you can find an Arabic Unicode font from some other source, and use that instead. |
| • | Unlike the other fonts, the Courier New typeface is a monospaced font, and as such does not look nearly as attractive for Arabic as the other fonts. (Arabic has characters of much greater width differential than does the Latin alphabet, and naturally wide characters need to be compressed significantly, while the very narrow characters are surrounded by large amounts of white space.) Further, the Courier font does not contain all the characters of the other three standard Windows fonts. For example, the hamza, madah, and other accents are missing. When text containing those accents is displayed in Courier New, any missing characters will be displayed as large open boxes, making the text essentially unreadable. |
In addition, most versions of Windows should have Andalus, Simplified Arabic, Simplified Arabic Fixed, and Traditional Arabic. However, these fonts have only very basic Latin alphabet support, so they will not likely prove useful if you are working in languages other than English (they do not even include support for most Western European languages). As noted above, the only way to use them in mixed Arabic and non-Arabic text is to issue typeface/font commands (Ctrl+T) whenever switching alphabets and languages.
In addition to the above fonts, you should also be able to use other Arabic Unicode fonts, either those recommended by colleagues or those found by searching the web. Note that:
| • | The fonts must be encoded as Unicode fonts: Fonts such as the non-Unicode versions of Linguist Software's Arabic fonts will not work (although any Unicode versions should). |
| • | In order to be used for non-Arabic (for example, the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and/or Hebrew alphabets), they need to support those blocks within Unicode that include the characters needed for those alphabets |
| • | In order for these Unicode fonts to support Arabic, they need to support the Arabic pages within Unicode, including the primary Arabic block, as well as the necessary characters (those needed for Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu) from the Arabic Presentation Forms-A and Arabic Presentation Forms-B blocks. |
| • | While there is nearly identical character coverage for the main Windows standard fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma [Courier New, as noted above, has somewhat different coverage]), virtually every other font will include a somewhat different set of characters. While two fonts may both claim to support both Arabic Presentation Forms A and B, the actual characters included -- and this can usually only be known by viewing the character encoding in the Windows Character Map (Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Character Map) -- will likely differ. What some people often forget is that this applies to the Latin section of these Unicode fonts as well: While most large fonts claim to support the Latin alphabet, many omit certain "modified" characters (those that contain diacritics, accents, or other variations). |
| • | In any case, remember that only the characters shown in the Arabic panels of the Nota Bene Character Inventory (Shift+Alt+F5) are supported in this release of Arabic Lingua, even if the font you are using includes additional Arabic characters. |
| • | We may be adding additional characters after Unicode version 5.0 fonts (which will contain additional characters) become available. (For example, one of the recommended Urdu standards incorporates additional characters only available in release 5.0. Supporting these now within Nota Bene would be an exercise in futility, since they are not yet available in any of the Windows standard fonts.) |
When searching the web for other available fonts, a good place to start is Alan Wood's fine page about Unicode fonts (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html#general):
| • | Most of the fonts listed when you click on Large Fonts that list support for Arabic, Arabic Presentation Forms-A, and Arabic Presentation Forms-B should provide relatively full support for both the Latin alphabet and Arabic (but note, again, that note all such fonts are created equal—Courier New, for example, does not support full Arabic, and this is undoubtedly true of other "large" fonts listed there) |
| • | Most of the fonts listed when you click on Arabic may provide fuller Arabic, but they provide very little Latin alphabet support: Many support only the English alphabet, while others don't even provide that. If you want to use these Arabic fonts, you will need to switch fonts to the desired font after selecting Arabic, and then switch back again to the Roman font when finished, all of which may prove somewhat onerous. (The PakType Naqsh font [https://sourceforge.net/projects/paktype] is an exception to this, but the typeface -- even for the Latin alphabet -- is a stylized script.) |
If the character you select is not supported by the current font:
| • | It may display as a box (or, perhaps, although rarely, as another non-expected symbol) |
| • | It may display an aesthetically less pleasing version of that character (for example, rather than using a precomposed version with an accent properly placed, it may try to build that character out of other less-suited components) |
| • | It may display the desired character, but from a different (although hopefully similar) font |
If for any reason a character does not display correctly, the first step is to try that character in one of the fonts in which it is known to be available, namely Times New Roman, Arial, or Tahoma. If it works there, but not in your selected font, the issue is almost certainly one with the font, and not with Nota Bene.
See also:
Arabic: Character Forms
Arabic
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