OKFAMILIES

With arabic font and running on your Mac and programs to figure in, following step is to check what quite Arabic font you’ll place onto it. sensible|the great|the nice} news is that there are voluminous good fonts on the web provided without charge, and a lot of accessible commercially. The dangerous is that it’s tough to work out which of them you’ll really use. The websites are usually rather imprecise on the topic, and not solely as a result of most of them are created for Windows and Unix users. That goes not only for freeware sites, however conjointly for industrial ones. they’re usually a lot of keen to inform us how lovely their Arabic font are, than whether or not we are able to use them or not.

It doesn’t facilitate that this issue is fairly advanced, there are numerous completely different formats for fonts, some don’t work on the Mac at all; some are OK for English characters, however not Arabic, and a few work in some programs and not in others! And, to prime it off, several a lot of work on new Macs than the one to procure 3 years ago.

To get some understanding of it, we’ve to line up some guidelines:

Old fonts, that’s arabic font created before ca. 2000, won’t work on any current Mac (unless they were created by Apple itself).
Newer fonts made in particular for the Mac can work on all Macs and in all programs. sadly, there are solely one or two of places we are able to notice such, however those 2 are terribly helpful.
Windows and Unix fonts created within the OpenType format will be utilized by most programs on new Macs (since late 2007). There are terribly several such fonts out there, each without charge and commercially, many hundred. however it should be arduous to seek out them and to differentiate OK fonts from those who don’t work.
“Old” includes each fonts created for the previous Mac and for previous versions of Windows. As mentioned elsewhere, the Mac, Windows and Unix all nowadays follow the “Unicode” customary, whereas older fonts used completely different systems and can’t work. however being a Unicode font isn’t enough – that customary simply identifies every character. additionally, the pc should be able to connect the characters into words. For that, it desires any directions, and that they return – you guessed it – in 2 varieties. One was created by Apple, they decision it the AAT (“Apple Advanced Technology”). Any font that uses the AAT system can work fine on any current Mac in all programs that do Arabic. nearly no-one outside Apple has created use of this format, advanced though it should be.
The other format was created by Microsoft and also the font maker Adobe. this can be referred to as OpenType, and is an extension of their font format TrueType. The Mac remains based mostly on AAT, however the Mac system of 2007 (“Leopard”, or 10.5) added support for OpenType Arabic fonts additionally. that offers most programs access to the current made supply of fonts.

Unfortunately for us, till you put in it, an OpenType font appearance precisely just like the previous regular Windows TrueType fonts that don’t work for us. (The font will have the name .otf, but most, definitely all freeware fonts, use .ttf, just like the previous fonts). any there are 2 complexities:
- Some Mac programs (Mellel, InDesign ME, some others) will use OpenType fonts even on Macs before ten.5.
- Some Mac programs (OpenOffice, NeoOffice) cannot use OpenType fonts even in ten.5 or higher.