Help Is This Arabic?

Also see<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;tv-and-radio&#x2F;2015&#x2F;oct&#x2F;15&#x2F;homeland-is-racist-artists-subversive-graffiti-tv-show" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;tv-and-radio&#x2F;2015&#x2F;oct&#x2F;15&#x2F;homelan...</a><p>“In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanising an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees.”

I work day-to-day with Arabic and English and it often feels like Arabic web support is an after thought.<p>It feels like a 3rd or 4th class citizen.<p>I&#x27;m talking VSCode, Sublime, Safari, Chrome, XSL, Numbers, Word etc not just lazy content creation mentioned in the link.<p>Can only imagine how bad it must be for other writing modes.

I&#x27;ve seen the same with Hebrew. It&#x27;s not nearly as widely spoken as Arabic but graphic artists like to include it on their designs and so on because of the unique letters which really contrast to the Latin alphabet.<p>Mistakes include: 1) Left to right letters 2) Bad translations, especially dating to the days when Google translate was not as good. 3) Incorrect grammar e.g. singular instead of plural, masculine words mixed with feminine. &quot;Welcome&quot; should be plural unless you really only want to welcome one person! 4) Spelling typos

If you are looking to learn Arabic but have always been scared by its perceived difficulty I cannot recommend language transfer enough:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.languagetransfer.org&#x2F;arabic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.languagetransfer.org&#x2F;arabic</a><p>His courses are so amazing that I got interested in Greek after listening to a couple of his lessons and listened to the entire course when I had no prior interest before. It&#x27;s that good.

I had to deal with Arabic one for a coworker, in a database where most other data were in English. The main pain point was the right to left writing and thus the weird behavior for selecting text that occurred in the text editor when mixing scripts. I wish I could force selection to always be right to left even if that doesn&#x27;t make sense in the target language but would make copy pasting easier.

&gt; We even have a website that will break our Arabic so that Photoshop breaks it back to normal. Yes, Adobe is aware. No, they do not care.

Unless return from the extra investment to make the software Arabic-compatible is worth it for the company, nobody’s going to care.

This is a pretty nice summary. Could use some pointers on what to do next. Like making sure the characters are not printed from last to first when the letters are not properly connected. Or using dir=rtl if it&#x27;s aligned wrong.

[I guess it&#x27;s not your project. Some ideas anyway.]<p>It would be nice to make an online checker, where anyone can upload an image and the site tries to check if it&#x27;s good (or at least not too bad).

The author, Rami Ismail, is also great to follow on twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tha_rami" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tha_rami</a>

Arabic-script typography on the web can also be complicated. I did a review&#x2F;demonstration of some fonts and issues that they may need to handle:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theobeers.com&#x2F;arabic-font-tests&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theobeers.com&#x2F;arabic-font-tests&#x2F;</a><p>The tl;dr for people who want Arabic-script text to look ok in their projects, without making it a focus, is that a modern &quot;native font stack&quot; (à la Bootstrap) does a fine job. I just wouldn&#x27;t recommend allowing things to fall straight back to &quot;serif&quot; or &quot;sans-serif.&quot;