Typing Arabic in OS X (by Tom Gewecke)

OS X comes with keyboards and fonts that let you type and read languages written in Arabic script, including Arabic, Persian (Farsi), Dari, Pashto, and Uzbek (plus Jawi and Uighur in 10.5). Also there is a language kit which can be installed in OS 9 that allows you to work in Arabic script in Classic mode.

Note that up until 10.5, only the "AAT" fonts provided by Apple and others can be used: Windows OpenType fonts for this script require a different rendering technology and will not display correct Arabic on a Mac (except in certain apps like Mellel and OpenOffice 2/X11). In Leopard and later, TextEdit can use Windows fonts as well. The default OS X Arabic font is Geeza Pro (or Lucida Grande in Jaguar).

Although outdated in various ways, the manual for the OS 9 Arabic Language Kit contains some useful information. It can be downloaded at:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=50037

Additional keyboards for Urdu, Kurdish, and Uyghur can be found here:

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/tckbs.html

http://www.redlers.com/downloadkeyboard.html

Additional AAT fonts that work with OS X can be found here:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ArabicFonts

http://www.redlers.com/downloadfont.html

For a Syriac/Aramaic keyboard and fonts, see this page.

http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2008/11/typing-and-reading-syriac.html

For a Jawi kit for 10.4, check this page:

Shah's Site

Direction Issues: In TextEdit, for best results use rich text mode and activate the menu item Format/Text/Writing Direction/Right to Left. Most word processors have a similar setting for Direction, sometimes under paragraph formatting, or even a button in a toolbar. In Mail, you need to use Control Click and access the contextual menu for the Writing Direction option (and make sure the default font in Mail Preferences is set to Lucida Grande rather than Helvetica). If necessary you can also try the add-on Direction Service or Writing Direction Menu.

Snow Leopard also has global direction settings available in System Preferences/Language & Text/Input Sources/Bidirectional Text.

Browser Issues: If you have MS Office, you may need to remove the fonts Arial and Times New Roman (and maybe Tahoma, Arabic Transparent, and Traditional Arabic) in order to get Safari to display certain Arabic web sites in connected script. Final damma (064F) is sometimes not displayed correctly by Safari. A work-around is to follow it by an Arabic full stop (06D4).

Applications: Some Apple OS X Applications that can do Arabic script are TextEdit, Mail, Address Book, iChat, iTunes, iMovie 6, FCE, and FCP. Pages, Keynote, and iWeb have various bugs with input/editing but may work acceptably for some users with limited requirements, especially if copy/paste from other apps is sufficient. Word processors that work are Mellel (the best), Nisus Writer, iText Pro, AbiWord, NeoOffice, and OpenOffice. Applications which do not work include AppleWorks, MS Office, ordinary Quark, and probably all Adobe and MacroMedia apps, except for the special Adobe ME series, which can be found here:

http://www.winsoft.fr/products/MEProducts.html

http://www.fontworld.com/me/freedemo.html

A special Quark for Arabic can be found here:

http://www.arabicsoftware.net/axt60mac.htm

The PowerPoint and Entourage components of Mac Office 2008 are reportedly able to do Arabic.

Pitfalls If you do not know the Arabic script but nonetheless need to work with text in one of the languages that use it, be aware that it is easy to produce garbage that may not be obvious to you -- for example letters in the wrong order, with the wrong shape, and not connected the right way. In such a case it is important to have someone who does know the script take look at the final product.

Sites of possible interest are:

The Arabic Mac
Mac4Arabs
Middle East Mac User Group
Iranian Mac User Group
Urdu on the Mac