Arabic "specials" on the keyboard of NRP

[Orientalist]

I appreciate the help and suggetions made by elbrecht and others; it makes working easier. However, I have on my old PowerBook G4 a so-called "ArabTimes" created by a fried many years ago. I use it as a German keyboard in Nisus 6.5. The special characters for transcriptions for Arabic I can add by using alt / or alt+shift without any "dead keys" or changing the "flag". I ask myself now, if I can transfer this "Arab Times" (by stick) to the OS 10.6. 4

[Elbrecht]

Well -

not knowing about Arabic myself - "ArabTimes" sounds to me like a hacked old font, and not a special keyboard. Here is a keyboard for Unicode fonts - no deadkeys, no changing flags - for German users, at least:

http://www.elbrecht.com/GermanOrientalistSIR.zip

HE

[martin]

Elbrecht is correct, the Classic "ArabTimes" font is one of those holdovers from the bad old days before Unicode.

Quick summary: there is a distinction between the actual text you have in a document, and what a font may display on screen. Some ornamental/dingbat fonts still do this: one types normal letters and on screen you see possibly a star, arabesque, arrow, etc. Many old Classic transliteration fonts do this. The user may be typing regular Latin/English characters into the document, while a font like ArabTimes happens to display Arabic letters on screen.

This is not a good way to construct a document. If you lose your font, or a colleague is lacking your font, the contents of your document are gibberish! These days you really should be inserting the correct Arabic Unicode characters as you type.

Anyways, if you have such Classic documents, it's possible to construct a NWP macro to translate them. You just have to know (or spend time figuring out) which characters your old font co-opted for its own purposes.

[Orientalist]

After the suggestions by elbrecht and his help and by this site:http://www.smi.uib.no/ksv/ArabHome.html

all the problems seem to have been solved.

Many thanks

Orientalist