Persian / Arabic Text

[aboammar]

Hi AboAmmar,

No offence taken then, I have obviously misrepresented your statements. This is a great forum, I've been helped here many times. The workaround may not have been detailed enough.

Perhaps someone can be more detailed with that to help this fellow out.

Do as suggested with both Xara and the Dear Xara forum section. You may get more results that way.

My experience with small companies has been much better software wise than with large companies. Though you may get more support features, the larger companies tend to not be as caring towards individual needs. Small software companies have to be caring towards individual needs in order to survive.

This s/w is very good, extremely fast and capable of doing most of what large s/w packages can for a fraction of the cost.

Anyway, have a good day and good luck in your search for a solution.

Thanks Karateed for your comments. I just bought Xara Xtream Pro 5 ten mintues ago though I do not really need it, but I did it just to show my support to Xara, and to show that I really do care about this company even though I mentioned before that I will never buy any upgrade until it support Arabic.

As for the work around .. it dose not work. Any more ideas?

[aboammar]

530 million people of the world's population speak Arabic but they are just part of the 1,570 million that read the language.

I myself do not speak any Semitic languages although I am amongst those who read Arabic daily and would support the implementation of 'right-to-left' texts.

Such support would also benefit Persian, Hebrew and Urdu etc.
We are not talking about 'small potatoes' here.

Anas

You are absolutely right Anas .. I missed that point So, by supporting RTL languages, this will not support only Arabic, but all languages that depends on 'right-to-left' so we are talking here about billions of people worldwide that will benefit from such feature!!

[jclements]

I guess you could also look at it this way. There are a LOT of talented artists and designers whose use RTL.

Our Xara community could be missing out ...

Regards.

[Ike Busser]

I don't think that the 'workarounds' mentioned in this thread are possible, unless someone knows any different.

Anas

I am quite sure my solution does work. All you need is a good font editor and mirror each character in the font set.
Then you can type mirrored text into a mirrred textframe.
Left to right in understandable text it is.

I don't have the time or need to do this, but otherwise I could easily do so on my RISC OS Iyonix or RiscPC

cheers

Ike

[ankhor]

Yep I am pretty sure it would work too, Ike.
And even for languages who write right to left and
bottom to top.
Although you would have to alter the font double.

[Luke.Hart]

Salaam, is correct. Arabic text has initial, medial, final and isolated forms for letters, so a letter that the user has entered (and hence the Unicode code point) could be displayed using any of the 4 different glyphs depending on its position within the word. All of this in addition to the R2L nature of the language.

For full description of the nature of the Arabic alphabet see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet.

[sunhome]

Pasting Right to Left text works in Designer pro 6

When I pasted in Xara, I chose RTF paste with success!

Again, I will say it, this is a "no-brainer" upgrade due to so many under-the-hood improvements.

Regards, James

[jon404]

There's a way. Enter your text in Word, Publisher, or Powerpoint, using Arial, Times new Roman, Georgia... any of the Microsoft core fonts... using Insert/Symbol. If you see a font on the list called Arial Unicode or Times New Roman Unicode it will have just about every alphabet known to mankind.

Enter your characters, then copy to clipboard. Open Xara; copy paste (rich text format) into a text box.

Xara should have Insert/Symbol Unicode support as part of its text editing. Unicode certainly isn't new!

[aboammar]

It has been over 18 years with so many versions of Xara software, yet and until now with the current version, Xara Designer Pro 7, still no support for Arabic texts!!!! Do you guys know why? Is it difficult, or costly? No, none of that .. it is just because Xara team does NOT care about Arabic support .. they never did, and never will!!

I started using Xara since 1995, and have upgraded to almost every version, though I never realy needed the upgrades, but was hoping that my support will help Xara team appreciate us Arabic users, and maybe they will add Arabic support one day!! Will, I was very stupid to believe that, so I am done supporting this stupid software .. no more upgrades until Arabic is supported!!

And Xara team should feel ashamed of themselves ... I mean there are tens of graphic software’s that support Arabic .. many of them are free, and most of them are cheaper than Xara!!!

If adding that will cost alot as others calim, then make a stand-alon Arabic version, and charge us $100 for each copy .. I will be more than happy to pay that extra, and I am sure most Arabic users will agree.

[Karateed]

Hi Aboammar,

I think you're reverting to that 'angry' state again. This group is a user group, not an official Xara support site. You should either address this directly and repeatedly to Xara or use the 'Dear Xara' thread in this forum. That's where Xara employees look for issues relating to their software.

I don't believe you really think this is stupid software or you would not have supported it for all these years....I'm sure you've found it very useful, though awkward in Arabic.

I think it's important to remember that Xara has a very small programmer and support staff for such a powerful program and that they achieve what they do, really is a miracle. The type of change you are talking about might be a very signifcant one in relationship to the actual coding that would need to be done. That requires enough resources to handle that in a timely manner. I can't speak for Xara, I'm just another user of the software but it seems to me they have significant resource challenges sometimes but they usually come through in the end. I also think it would be great if a software package could be everything to everybody but there is no such thing in this world, even the huge companies with tons of resources don't have that.

I would hope someday that Arabic does get supported but it could be a while if they haven't done it yet as I'm sure they've seen these posts.

At any rate, it would be great if your posts were of a calmer nature, though I'm sure you're very frustrated. Honey gains more support than vinegar.

Take care,