Urgent! Index in Arabic alphabetical order

[Orientalist]

I'm creating a list of Arabic names with page numbers.

How can a bring the list in Arabic alphabetical order?
Please describe the steps, it was very simple in my first Nisus...

Thanks

Orientalist

[Elbrecht]

Hi -

not knowing Arabic myself - I would guess: you have to have a list in Arabic Language with paragraphs for each list item. Then apply "Edit/Sort Paragraphs/…" for the selected list items. Sorting is Language specific, that's why Arabic Sorting works in Arabic Language only…

HE

[Orientalist]

Thanks. Where ist this "edit - sort paragraphs"? Not in Werkzeuge, there is ohnly Index etc.

I have the list and I could sort the paragraphs very easily with my old Nisus.

O.

[Orientalist]

It does not work in Bearbeiten - Absätze sortieren.

[Elbrecht]

Hi -

make sure your list is in Arabic "language" - should show in your "language" menu at the bottom. Not sure about RTL vs LTR writing direction - but RTL should work. Sorry I have no list to try…

HE

[Orientalist]

Thank you - it works. The problem was, that one single name did not appear in the alphabetical order. I had to put it into the right place by hand.

Best

Orientalist

[Elbrecht]

Hi -

"one" only? - lucky guy!

HE

[Orientalist]

The problem was: while writting right to left in Arabic I had a space on the right as first consonant. So it did not work.

sh#! happens. By the way: Nisus still has a problem on this point. Many names in Arabic have an "al-" at the beginning. So the name al-Qāsim will appear at the beginning of the list (because a - Alif - is the first letter in the Arabic alphabet) and
not under Q (in Arabic letters, of course) as it should be. So I have to delete "al-" and after finishing the list I have do add "al-" again under Qāsim in order to have al-Qāsim on the correct place under Q.

Well, not so "lucky guy"

Orientalist

[Elbrecht]

Well -

you are right: sh#! happens! But the "al-"thing is not Nisus' - let Apple know about it. Nisus just uses Apple's text engine…

HE

[Orientalist]

OK: Nisus can inform Apple about this problems. I am not a technician.

Many years ago Nisus could not index names in the footnotes. I and possibly also others have drown attenion to this. Now it works.

Best

O.

[Þorvarður]

Many names in Arabic have an "al-" at the beginning. So the name al-Qāsim will appear at the beginning of the list (because a - Alif - is the first letter in the Arabic alphabet) and
not under Q (in Arabic letters, of course) as it should be. So I have to delete "al-" and after finishing the list I have do add "al-" again under Qāsim in order to have al-Qāsim on the correct place under Q.

You can exclude "al-" from the sort order by using the "Invert Selection" menu command (in: Edit > Selection > Invert Selection)

If you have a list like this

al-Qāsim
al-Zāsim
al-Bāsim
al-Aāsim

you can select "al-" in 'al-Qāsim', and then run this macro:

Find All Selected Text
Invert Selection
Ascending (A-Z)

This will give you the list you need. It should look like this:

al-Aāsim
al-Bāsim
al-Qāsim
al-Zāsim

Did this solve the problem?
Þorvarður

[Hamid]

[...]
Did this solve the problem?
Þorvarður

This does not resolve the issue because sorting applies to whole paragraphs.

Also, this is not a text engine issue because which characters should be disregarded when sorting are determined by the user. This is a feature of indexing. I have already made this feature request for NWP.
This feature is available, for example, in InDesign. Here "al-Mahdiyya" will appear as such in the index but not under "a" but under "M".

TopicOptionsInDesign.gif (17.04 KiB) Viewed 22459 times

[Elbrecht]

Well -

Sorting is a Language feature and should work correct. Nisus Writer depends on Apple's Text Engine for that matter. Adobe is a different beast - isn't it!?

HE

[martin]

Sorting is a Language feature and should work correct. Nisus Writer depends on Apple's Text Engine for that matter

It's true that NWP depends on Apple for sorting, but it's actually even lower-level than the Cocoa text engine (which NWP uses)– sorting is handled by core Unicode rules. And even though this is low-level functionality, it's quite complicated because of the huge number of Unicode characters, scripts, and localized sorting rules (not to mention even more technical issues like normalization forms).

In any case, while OSX does provide sorting, in this case it's not within Apple's responsibility to fix. I imagine the desire to ignore "al-" for Arabic text is much like the desire to ignore "The" when sorting English titles, ie: this is context sensitive. In this case, when indexing, it's desirable to ignore the word, but not universally.

Also, this is not a text engine issue because which characters should be disregarded when sorting are determined by the user. This is a feature of indexing. I have already made this feature request for NWP.

Yes, thank you for that Hamid. The enhancement request has already been filed, and I'll add some votes to the issue for the others in this thread.

[ameddo]

If Microsoft Windows (with Arabic Language Pack) can do the sorting without any problem, with options such as "ignoring aliflam, kashida and diacritics, then why shouldn't NWP not do it?