English to Arabic via InDesign?

[Jordaan]

Hi there,

I'm working on an identity project (design/mechanicals) for a client who does business with the Middle East/Gulf. The back of his business card must be written in Modern Standard Arabic (simple stuff, just name, address, phones, website, email); front is in English.

Several Arabic fonts are enabled in the FontBook but I can't manage to make them happen in InDesign (they screen as squares).

Are Arabic letters/fonts one-to-one to English? If I type, say, 'apple' in English does that correspond to 5 letters in Arabic?

There's also the issue of Arabic being written from right to left. Does Western left-right software, like InDesign, adapt to that format?

My facts:
- System is OSX 10.4.7
- Working with InDesign CS2
- International keyboard is active in Arabic
- Arabic fonts are enabled in FontBook

Does anybody have any experience with this kind of (international) problem? If so, please share your konwledge and I'll be eternally grateful.

:-) Jordaan

[ksv]

Adobe has the practice of charging extra for enabling other scripts. In fact, you'll have to buy a separate Arabic version of InDesign to be able to write Arabic.

The free workaround is to set the types in e.g. TextEdit and exporting to PDF through the Print dialog. You can then import the pdf document into InDesign. You'll be able to scale and position the types, but not edit them.

Arabic script is nearly phonetic and uses different letters than Latin script. E.g. P is not a letter in the Arabic alphabet, so B is considered the equivalent. Short vowels are not considered letters on their own and are typically not written in MSA, so most transliterated words ("translated" letter-by-letter) appear shorter in Arabic. E.g. apple would be written abl or abel (at least if my self-taught knowledge is correct )

[Natobasso]

very good information, ksv. Gonna keep this under my hat for later.