But you could go a step further and make the Arabic match the English more closely:Īs Arabic works best justified, perhaps you would even go a step further and justify the Arabic (although some people might prefer consistency with the English typesetting): That is now readable Arabic (well, it is readable lorem ipsum text in an Arabic script to be pedantic). Let’s open the setting in InDesign ME, and apply a basic font and settings: Any diacritics will also be incorrectly positioned. Each letter in Arabic takes a different from depending on whether it is isolated, at the start of a word, in the middle of a word or at the end of a word. Even if they were re-ordered, the letters are incorrect forms. Take an example of a simple layout that needs Arabic typesetting:Ĭopy and paste the Arabic text into ordinary InDesign, apply an Arabic font and right align it as we know Arabic reads from the right:
This can lead to the embarrassment of sending your client gibberish. When typesetting a line or two of Arabic, there may be a temptation to just paste the text into InDesign and hope. Middle Eastern versions of Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver also exist: in fact you can buy Creative Suite ME. The program is a completely separate version of InDesign tailored to Middle Eastern languages, provides good support for Arabic, Farsi and Urdu (in CS5), and has helpful page “flipping” features. That said, InDesign now rules the roost when it comes to Arabic typesetting with a host of scripts and other options available.įor “industrial strength” Arabic typesetting, InDesign ME is probably the pick of the bunch. The original version was pre-Unicode but a newer version is much improved and supports Unicode. For many years, the Quark Xtension “Arabic XT” was the standard although required some finesse. Both require plug-ins or specialised versions. Neither Adobe InDesign nor Quark Xpress as they come “out of the box” allow you to typeset Arabic. One extra complication for the unaware is that numerals within Arabic text read from left to right even the text around them reads from right to left. If you are converting an English layout to Arabic, graphics and pictures may also need to “flip” to preserve the sense and reading order. In a text table, the first column is the right-hand one. In a 3 column page of Arabic text, the first column starts at the top right of the page. In fact, the whole layout must reflect this directionality. Arabic text must be typeset to reflect this: text that is left aligned in English should generally become right aligned in Arabic. Arabic runs in the other direction: the text starts on the right-hand side of the line and reads on to the left. Yet, for those used to other languages, Arabic typesetting contains some stumbling blocks.Ī line of English text starts at the left-hand side and is read from the left to the right. So it is no surprise that Arabic frequently crops up in multilingual typesetting projects. Arabic is an official language in 26 countries, the third most frequent behind English and French. Geographically it is a key language in a wide belt stretching from Morocco across north Africa via Libya and Egypt through the Middle East to the Gulf states in the East such as UAE and Oman. Today, it is spoken as a first language by 280 million people. Arabic typesetting and calligraphy also has a long history, as described in this excellent ilovetypography article, “Arabic calligraphy as a typographic exercise”. The Arabic language has a long cultural history, with Classical Arabic stretching back to least the 4th Century. Arabic is one of the world’s great languages.
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