Windows XP is handling Arabic as Unicode text, but it is possible that some of your applications are not. Question marks generally indicate that an application is unable to recognise the pasted character code.

You may also have another problem in that some of your Arabic fonts may not themselves use Unicode encoding. This would explain why changing fonts from Arial, which is a Unicode font, to another font might not work.

In order to handle Arabic in Illustrator, you would need the Middle East version of that application. The regular version does not support right-to-left text or Arabic script shaping.

Since you don’t need to handle text per se, one easy option might be to make a custom font using a hacked 8-bit encoding, e.g. putting Arabic glyphs in ANSI Latin decimal positions, and then enter the characters manually in Illustrator. You could do this with the relatively cheap TypeTool.

Thanks, John. A tad over my head ragarding ANSI and decimal points, etc. but perhaps I’ll figure it out. In the mean time I’ll try to find sme cheap font tool.

Any suggestions? Freeware would be nice

And/or perhaps I’ll go and Google around for some Unicode Arabic fonts.

Here are two freeware font tools:

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
http://www.high-logic.com/

I used the latter, Font Creator, for TT table editing before everything I needed was added to FontLab. I have not tried FontForge.

<font class=”dontLookLikeCrap”>Thanks. I checked out the developer’s page for the app you use, and frankly, all of this is getting way to complex for me. Having to learn a whole new technology. Kind of like a total newbie starting to learn PhotoShop — LOL. I may have to change my strategy here and find some other solutiuon. But thanks to all for help. Ciao.</font>

Maybe you could just copy paste the outlines from the glyph windows into illustrator, and then just assemble the words there. You could typeset the text in Word just to see what it looks like (that is if you’re not familiar with the language). You’ll also need to watch out for the alignments of certain characters since some of them don’t sit on the baseline.

I think this would be simpler than building a new font but I wouldn’t know if you would be violating any copyright laws with this or not. You will probably need to make certain adjustments to the outlines (especially the baseline strip) if you want the text to sit on a circle.

Philip, maybe you should subcontract?
But if you’re wary of spending $100 on TypeTool :-) you might have to resort to bartering.

Nadine, what you propose sounds totally legal — and ethical.
(BTW, please say hi to Beirut for me. :-)

hhp

Sure :-)
I’m spending 3 weeks there next month…

Then you’ll be in the neighborhood of Thessaloniki?
http://www.uom.gr/uompress/2nd_int_conference/

hhp

Yes definitely. I went to the first one and I’ll attend this one as well. I’m looking forward to it. The program is very interesting and there’s so many people from Reading. It brings back good memories :-)