oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (01/09/89)
If you use the arabic script manager, available from APDA, then any editor
based on the Text Edit routines in the ROM should work in arabic.
MockWrite and MiniWriter are two to try. Acta should also work.
(Particularly the new version, which, from the ads seems to use new text
edit.)
Once you've installed the arabic fonts in your system file, and
installed the appropriate code into your system, almost all your old Mac
software will work in arabic, magically. At least, that is the theory. I
don't speak arabic, so I can't really tell.
It is pretty neat: as you type, the forms of letters used for standalone
get drawn, the next letter causes the first letter to be replaced by its
initial form, and the new letter is drawn in the final form. The next
letter causes the second letter to turn to its medial form, and so on.
Justification is done correctly, by extending the ties between the
letters, instead of, as in English, widening the spaces.
It is really an education to watch a mac running this way. With a
NewTextEdit based editor, you can mix radically different langauges like
English, Arabic, Japanese, and Hebrew all on the same line, and depending
on where the cursor is, the keyboard remaps itself appropriately. It
completely blows away every other operating system I've ever seen. (At
best single applications run this well on other machines, I've yet to see
another where this kind of thing was just an operating system service.)
But people are never satisfied. Lets lobby apple to put high quality,
fast machine translation into the ROMs on their next machine. :->
--- David Phillip Oster --"When we replace the mouse with a pen,
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --3 button mouse fans will need saxophone
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --lessons." - Gasee