NWP with both German and Arabic characters

[Orientalist]

There are no problems in writing in Latin (German) characters and in Arabic in the same line of the document.

But there IS a problem after saving it! The Arabic does not appear correctly after saving the text as .doc . There are some possibilities to chose from, but which one is the right one in order to save it and which makes other users possible to open it without having Nisus or even a Mac.

Other question of minor interest: how can I change the characters from German to Arabic by usin the keyboard instead of going to to flag on the right of the menue?

Thanks
Orientalist

[Hamid]

Instead of using the Save As menu command, you have to use File:Export As menu command. Then you can choose either Microsoft Word Format (binary) or Open Office XML format available in the File Format drop-down menu in the Export dialog.

To switch keyboard between German and Arabic layout, you can use Command Space, which we have used since before OS X. Now this command by default applies to Spotlight; therefore, in Spotlight Preferences uncheck 'Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut'.

[Orientalist]

Thank you very much. I will do my best!
Orientalist

[xiamenese]

I have a slightly different approach to this, though my languages are English and Chinese. Cmd-space merely switches keyboard, whereas I find it useful to mark the different stretches as in a given language.

Go to the <Format : Language : Edit Languages> menu entry, as that will open up the preference pane so that you can select various parameters for working in that language, including default font, secondary font, dictionary and thesaurus if available, and so on. When you've done that, go to the "Shortcuts" pane of the preferences, negotiate down the list to choose each of your languages and set a suitably memorable short-cut for it. NWP short-cuts are brilliant, as you can set multi-letter short-cuts; for instance, you could give German the short-cut <Cmd-de>, and Arabic as <Cmd-ar> ... or you can find ordinary ones that are available or that are basically set to things you don't use enough to need a short-cut, and replace them

I have British English set to <Opt-Cmd-b> and Simplified Chinese to <Opt-Cmd-h> (In Chinese, the language is "hanyu" so it's memorable). So, even if I'm only typing a single character, with that shortcut, it is tagged as being in Chinese, and then I can switch back to English, with the text following text so marked.

Mark

[Hamid]

Multi letter keyboard short cuts such as <Cmd-de> will not work to switch back from an Arabic keyboard layout or from any other non-Roman script keyboard layout. Multi letter keyboard short cuts work only from Roman script keyboard layouts. I have reported this as a bug.

[xiamenese]

Not being an Arabist, and not actually using multi-character short-cuts, that hadn't occurred to me. I take that point, but there are many other single-character multi-modifier short-cuts easily available that he/you could look into. Like the <Cmd-Opt-b> and <Cmd-Opt-h> which I use.

Mark

[Orientalist]

Thank you all.
Hamid: it does not work. An arabic text or an arabic-german text in the same line or in different lines does not appear correctly after export (and saving)to Microsoft Word format or to Open Office XML. The Arabic is as it had been written from the left to right. But it was correctly written by me. The story works as RTF in Arabic.

What is: Export dialog: File format drop down?? I am not a computer freak at all.

Where are the very important vokals for Arabic?

Orientalist

[Hamid]

When you apply 'Ablage:Exportieren als...' menu command, you get this dialog;

Exportieren als.png (35.71 KiB) Viewed 11600 times

The drop-down menu in that dialog is at 'Dateiformat:'

You can view the layout of characters of any keyboard layout in the Keyboard Viewer from the Flag menu.

With the Arabic keyboard layout, short vowels and other marks are obtained by pressing the Shift key with one of qwertyui:
Shift-q gives fatḥa
Shift-w gives tanwīn fatḥa
Shift-e gives kasra
Shift-r gives tanwīn kasra
Shift-t gives ḍamma
Shift-y gives tanwīn ḍamma
Shift-u gives sukūn
Shift-i gives shadda

[martin]

But there IS a problem after saving it! The Arabic does not appear correctly after saving the text as .doc . There are some possibilities to chose from, but which one is the right one in order to save it and which makes other users possible to open it without having Nisus or even a Mac.

Hamid: it does not work. An arabic text or an arabic-german text in the same line or in different lines does not appear correctly after export (and saving)to Microsoft Word format or to Open Office XML. The Arabic is as it had been written from the left to right. But it was correctly written by me. The story works as RTF in Arabic.

All the file formats (RTF, .doc, and OpenOffice XML) should be able to preserve mixed German and Arabic text documents. When you say that the Arabic does not display correctly, which application are you using?

Other question of minor interest: how can I change the characters from German to Arabic by usin the keyboard instead of going to to flag on the right of the menue?

As the others have mentioned, setting up custom keyboard shortcuts is the best.

[martin]

To switch keyboard between German and Arabic layout, you can use Command Space, which we have used since before OS X. Now this command by default applies to Spotlight; therefore, in Spotlight Preferences uncheck 'Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut'.

That's true, but as Mark mentioned (and I believe you know), using Command + Command space to change the keyboard layout won't also change the Nisus Writer language. That means that your text won't be marked with the proper language attribute, which controls ancillary settings like the spelling dictionary. It's best to change the Nisus Writer language, which can in turn automatically change the keyboard layout, spelling dictionary, font, etc.

Multi letter keyboard short cuts such as <Cmd-de> will not work to switch back from an Arabic keyboard layout or from any other non-Roman script keyboard layout. Multi letter keyboard short cuts work only from Roman script keyboard layouts. I have reported this as a bug.

That's true, there is a bug with multi-letter keyboard shortcuts and it's definitely on our list of things to fix.

The bug is that multi-letter keyboard shortcuts are matched using the generated text, eg: the actual characters that would be inserted into the document. So if you configure a shortcut like Command + "DD", and are using the Arabic QWERTY layout, you won't be able to activate the shortcut. However, you can add a shortcut like Command + "دد" which can be activated when using the Arabic keyboard layout.

[Orientalist]

Thank you all! The most important for me is this:Here is a wrtiiten text in Nisus:

في البداية نكتب باللغة العربية في كل السطر
في السطر الثاني أيضا لكننا سنغير هذه الصورة وسنبدأ كما يلي :
we write like this, but in the samle line we explain that كتاب means book باللغة العربية . In order to write Arabic:عربي I changed only the flag (up on the right) to Arabic but not in the document, because we have a doc. in Roman characters with some فيه بعض عبارات عربية فحسب and continue....etc. etc. أتمنى أن يظهر كل شيء على ما يرام . Thank you

And this appears after export as Microsoft Word Format: saved as test.doc

في البداية نكتب باللغة العربية في كل السطر
في السطر الثاني أيضا لكننا سنغير هذه الصورة وسنبدأ كما يلي :
we write like this, but in the samle line we explain that كتاب means book باللغة العربية . In order to write Arabic:عربي I changed only the flag (up on the right) to Arabic but not in the document, because we have a doc. in Roman characters with some فيه بعض عبارات عربية فحسب and continue....etc. etc. أتمنى أن يظهر كل شيء على ما يرام . Thank you


(Oh, what is this??) In my .doc the arabic characters are not bound to each other but have the same direction right to left. After copying the .doc to here iz is OK! It is crazy. Why?

Orientalist

[Kino]

In my .doc the arabic characters are not bound to each other but have the same direction right to left.

In what application did you open the doc file? AFAIK Word for Mac does not support Arabic. Windows Word 2000 and later can display Arabic correctly when running in Windows 2000 and later (I don’t know about non-professional versions of XP and ME, though.)

After copying the .doc to here iz is OK! It is crazy. Why?

Because what you copied from another application to a browser window is pasted as plain text and displayed by the web browser’s text engine, nullifying the differences due to the source applications. To illustrate this kind of problem, you’d better attach a screenshot.

[Orientalist]

I hope I understand you correctly: I write a bilingual text in Nisus Compressed Rich Text. (Arabtest). Than I save it as Arabtest.doc and export it as Microsoft Word Format.
Result: the Arabic part is not correctly displayed.
By saving the Nisus Compr. Richt Text as PDF than it is OK.

[Kino]

I write a bilingual text in Nisus Compressed Rich Text. (Arabtest). Than I save it as Arabtest.doc and export it as Microsoft Word Format.
Result: the Arabic part is not correctly displayed.

by what application???

Attached doc file exported from NWP seems to be correctly displayed by Word 2000.

ArTest.zip

(7.79 KiB) Downloaded 485 times

ArTest.png (50.82 KiB) Viewed 11456 times

I applied Arabic language on Arabic portions of the text and set the paragraph directions explicitly because that is my habit. I don't know if these steps are necessary. If you don't have a Windows Word, try to open your Arabtest.doc or my ArTest.doc in TextEdit.

[Orientalist]

Arabtest.doc does not display Arabic correctly. But by opening it with TextEdit everything os OK.
So I can send my documents to collegues written and edited in Nisus Writer (I have in the Mac Windows Office 2008 for Mac but I dont like it), exported as .doc by TextEdit or PDF. This is for me now how things stand....
Thnak you

I dont know what you mean with "application"

Orientalist