Recently in Arabic Script Category

Unicode version 5.1 was recently released, and includes some new code blocks as well as new specifications. As with all new versions of Unicode there will be a time lag until the new items can be incorporated into fonts and utilities, but here is a partial list of new items

If you're interested in the new characters, the best place to view them is at http://www.unicode.org/charts/

New Plane 0 Scripts

• Cham (Cambodia/Vietnam)
• Kayah Li (Thailand/Myanmar)
• Lepcha (India)
• Ol Chiki/Santali (India)
• Rejang (indonesia)
• Saurashtra (India)
• Sundanese (Indonesia)
• Vai (Liberia)

Script Extensions

These blocks add characters to previously encoded scripts.

• Cyrillic Extended-A
• Cyrillic Extended-B
• Arabic - characters for math, 4 Qu'ranic and multiple characters for different languages
• Indic - Malayalam, Tamil character sequences, Devanagari chandra a,
  Sanskrit sounds in Gurmukhi, Oriya, Telegu
• Latin - characters for minority languages and capital German sharp S (rare)
• Math Symbols
• Medievalist Punctuation - for research
• Myanmar Additions

New Plane 1 Ancient Scripts and Miscellaneous Symbols

• Carian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Lycian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Lydian (Anatolia/Turkey)
• Phaistos Disk (Crete)
• Domino Tile Symbols
• Mahjong Tile Symbols

As I mentioned in my previous entry "Formatting Arabic Numbers", most Arabic documents include Western style "straight" numbers like 1,2,3 by default instead of "curly" Middle Eastern numbers like १,२,३,, but you can configure Word to generate the curly numbers.

FYI - The curly style are actually called "Hindi numbers", while "Arabic" numbers refer to the straight Western style (vs. older Roman numbers like I,II,III).

Word 2007 (thanks to Katia Zakharia for details)

1. Make sure you have activated an appropriate Arabic, Persian or other regional keyboard in the Windows Control Panel
2. Open Word 2007, then click the circular Office icon in the upper left.
   
3. In the new window, click the Word Options button in the lower right corner.
4. Click Advanced in the left menu.
5. Scroll to the Show document content section then look for the Numeral menu.
6. Choose Context in the Numerals menu then close the window
   Note: Do not choose "Hindi" as your option unless you want this style in all documents (including English).
   



7. In the Word document, when you switch to an Arabic keyboard, numbers will be in the Hindi style.

Word 2003 for Windows

Instructions are available from http://www.uga.edu/islam/arabic_windows.html. Scroll to section 8c.

Macintosh NeoOffice (from their support forum)

A similar option is available in the free open source NeoOffice package.

1. Open NeoOffice, then click Preferences in the NeoOffice menu.
2. In the Preferences panel, click the arrow to the left of Language Settings to view additional options. Click the Languages link.
   
3. Check the option for Enabled for complex text layout. A new link on the left called Complex Text Layout.
4. Click the new Complex Text Layout link in the left.
5. In the Numerals select Hindi.

Macintosh Word 2004

I am not aware of a similar tool in Word 2004 for the Mac. I was able to create some Auto Correct text which replaces "\1\" with १.

The only other option it to tweak the Region settings in System Preferences, but that affects every application.

Someone on another posted an interesting question I hadn't pondered yet - why can you switch a keyboard to Arabic, Hindi or Japanese, but still end up with Western numbers?

Example Numbers
* Western (Latin) - 0, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
* Hindi (Arabic) - ०,१,२,३,४,५,६,७,८,९

Part of the answer is that Western numbers have become a true global standard. According to this Arabeyse.Org forum post from Arfeen Serajul, many Western Arabic speaking countries like Morocco ONLY use Western numbers and are unfamiliar with what we call "Arabic numbers" (Arabic speakers call them "Hindi numbers").

But...the other part of the answer is that the numbers are really numbers. If you input numbers into a spreadsheet like Excel, you want all the calculations to be accurate. From a computing point of view, you have one number, but a variety of options of how you want to display it (with Western as the default in the U.S.)

So, to get non-Western numbers, you typically have to go into the Region settings, not the keyboard settings. Here are some sample instructions for Microsoft Windows. The big gotcha (and it's a doozy) is that you often change the number display setting ACROSS THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM.

I did experiment with displaying Arabic (Hindi) numbers, but ended up seeing them everywhere, even in English Web sites. Just a tad disorienting.

If you do need to display non-Western numbers, I would recommend doing it in just Word only (there are some options). It's still tricky though - I had to do an AutoCorrect hack in one case (e.g. \1 = १). I think I missed a step somewhere....

I just found this 2004 presentation on Persian language support from Behdad Esfabod at
http://behdad.org/download/Publications/persiancomputing/a007.pdf

Interestingly, they seemed to have surrendered to the generic Tahoma font (although maybe things have improved since then).

Arabic is enough of a challenge to work with on a computing level because it's right to left and has special ligature forms for when certain letters come together (plus consonant forms change depending on if it's at the end, beginning or middle of a word).

But wait until you hit Urdu and Persian! Now you have to work with letters not found in Arabic and a different form of calligraphy. Although modern Arabic text is based on Naskh writing, Persian and Urdu prefer Nastaliq writing.

There's actually a nice picture from the Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_%28script%29

The lesson for me was that every language seems to need its own special support even if its script is already "covered."