Arabic on the Mac under OS 9 and earlier

So how Arabic does it get?

In order to get the former option, the fully Arabized Mac, you would most normally go to an Apple dealer in the Middle East, where such set-ups are standard, and they would prepare the machine for you. If you are reading this, it is more likely that you are in the second category, and wish to add Arabic capabilities to a Mac that otherwise will be used in Western languages. We will therefore focus on this in the following.

How do I get hold of Arabic?

OS 9-9.2

• Insert the OS System Install CD (the one you used to install the System, or which came with the computer), and click the "Mac OS Installation" icon.
• In the first panel, click "Continue".
• You are asked to indicate disk, accept the default (your hard drive).
• So far so good. In the next box, you are asked if you want a new installation of the System. You do not want that. Instead, click on the button "Add/Remove".
• Then you get to a long list of options of what to add or remove. Scroll down until til you find "Languages", and select it. In the small drop-down menu beside the item, select "Customized Installation". Make sure nothing else is selected in this long list; only Languages and Customized, before moving on.
• In the list of languages that appear, choose the "Arabic" option. Click OK and the installation will commence.
• After the restart, notice that the standard installation, while it includes all you need, will only add a couple of Arabic fonts. You will want more; there is a folder of them on the Installation CD. Check the folder "CD Extras", "Language Kits CD Extras", click on "Arabic.img", this creates a disk image where you will find a Fonts folder. Drag the fonts you want to your hard disk's System : Fonts folder (but note: In a couple of these combinations, some bugs have appeared. See the bug warning concerning some of those fonts, below.)
  For a graphical walk-through of the process, check here.

OS 8.5-8.6

However, for full use of Arabic, you will want a more complete Arabic installation, with more than a single font and including the various control panels that let you regulate the use of Arabic. For this, you will need the Arabic Language Kit (below, under 7.5). If you have an earlier version of the Language Kit, you will also need to run the OS 8.5 [8.6] Language Kit Updater, which you can find in the "Language Kit Update" folder inside the "CD Extras" folder on the OS 8.5/8.6 system install disk. You probably also need to use the updater if you upgrade the Arabic from OS 8.0/8.1, but you do not need it if you move just from 8.5 to 8.6.

OS 8.0-8.1

OS 7.5-7.6

• 7.5.0 accepts both the older "7.0.1" and "7.1" Arabic resources (below), as well as the "Nisus 7.5" package and the Arabic Language Kit package that appeared at this time.
• 7.5.1 does not accept the 7.0.1 and 7.1 resources, but will accept the Nisus 7.5 package as well as the ALK.
• 7.5.2 has been reported to behave both as 7.5.0 or as 7.5.1.
• 7.5.5 behaves as 7.5.1, only Nisus 7.5 package or ALK.

Arabic Language Kit
This Arabic Language Kit (ALK) is a product that was sold by Apple. Its contents was basically the same as you got in older (and newer) version of Arabic, that is, WorldScript, the Arabic resources, the Language Registry and similar, and a set of Arabic fonts (and Arabized versions of Simple Text etc.). The advantage was that it as a package was easy to get hold of, even regular mail-order firms sold it, the disadvantage of course that it cost money - about $100 unless you got it bundled with some other software. After releasing the OS 9 Arabic for free (that is, bundled with the OS), Apple has stopped selling the language kits, but you may still find remaining copies sold by Nisus or other firms for users of pre-OS 9 machines (the OS 9 bundle will not work on pre-OS 9 Macs). Notice that the Arabic Language Kit gave you neither more nor less than any other version of Arabic discussed here (bar an extra font or two), it was a marketing package.

The ALK was produced at least in two versions, 1.0 and 1.0.1. To my knowledge there is no major difference between them, and they can both be used on all machines running from 7.1 to 7.6.1, while under OS 8 they both need to be updated (see OS 8 above). You can use the updater on either 1.0 or 1.1. Apple at the time said that OS 8 support was to be included in future versions of the ALK, and I have seen this referred to as "ALK 2.0". I have not had it confirmed whether or not this version ever became commercially available; but it in any case gave the same result as using 1.0.x together with the relevant Language Kit Updater (see OS 8, above). Notice that the updater will only work if you have Roman as your primary script (see below for primary scripts).

We mentioned the "Nisus package". Nisus is a word processer that is often used with Arabic or other non-European languages (below). For a period they split their product in two: a non-copy-protected version that only worked with Roman script, and a copy-protected version that required a hardware dongle to work (this division was removed with Nisus version 5.0). When you bought the "dongle version", which they called the "language key", you also got the system resources required to write Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic and Central European languages. These were the same elements that Apple itself made, but packaged by Nisus. When you installed these, the installer checked which OS your Mac was running, at the time the options were 7.1 or 7.5, and installed the relevant set of Arabic resources [quietly, without telling you that there was a difference]. This latter is what we here call the "Nisus 7.5 package", it is what the Nisus installer put on a Mac running 7.5.x. As one can see, it was fairly obscure way of getting hold of the resources, but that package lasted a little longer than the more common 7.1 Arabic reources, at least through all versions of 7.5.x.

OS 7.1

OS 7.0.1

OS 7.0

OS 3.2 - 6

The Arabic-only Mac OS 4-6 was less useful in Europe. Someone (me) therefore hacked a version of the Arabic system 6.0.7 so that it worked as English dominant, but had Arabic capabilities, the same as the later OS 7+. This version is still available at the download area of this site, although it is of course only of historical interest today.

The DIY manual: What to install?

(i) the WorldScript I extension [or its predecessor, the Arabic extension]
(ii) the Arabic script module and
(iii) Arabic fonts, and at least the al-Qahira font.
(iv) the Arabic Settings control panel
(v) the Arabic Calendar control panel [under OS 7]
(vi) something called the "Pack7Patch" extension, whose function is opaque to me, but relates to the numbers [OS 7.0 only].
If you have OS 7 and a PowerMac, you also need to make sure that the WorldScript Power Adapter, which came with your machine, is still in the Extensions folder. Not needed or to be used for OS 8.

Strictly speaking, only the 3 first elements are required, but you will normally install all. They are very small, apart from the fonts only a couple of hundred K or less, and you do not need more memory or hard disk to use them.

You install them like any other System extension or font, by dropping the whole kabundle on top of the closed System Folder icon. That should put everything in its correct place, but it it doesn't, here is where they go:

* The WorldScript I / Arabic (depending on your version) and Pack7 extensions in the extensions folder
* The Arabic script (+ keyboard if separate) in the System file
* The Arabic (Arabic Settings) and Arabic Calendar cp in the control panels folder
* All the fonts, incl. the al-Qahira font (the Arabic system font) in the Fonts folder [Extensions folder under System 7.0.1]

If installation was correct, you will upon restart have a keyboard menu with your national flag in the menu bar. If you can't see anything like that, installation was not successful, but if you do and you can see "Arabic" in this menu, the Arabic is installed properly.

Notice that when Arabic (or any other non-European script) is installed on your Mac, the Arabic script file in the System file becomes invisible -- so that you can't cause the Mac to crash by pulling it out. Restart with extensions off in order to see the script file, e.g. if you want to copy it to somewhere else.

In a couple of these combinations, some bugs have appeared. See the bug list for details on this if you find something strange. If you are interested in the more technical aspects of the packages, click here for a list of the WorldScript resources, as they appeared in the 7.1/7.5 Language Key package marketed by Nisus. They are basically the same in later versions of the system.

What is WorldScript anyway, and what is a "script"?

What holds this together is small item hidden in System folder which Apple calls "WorldScript", and which regulates how these various scripts interact. You do not need to know anything about it, nor do you have read what follows in this paragraph, but we will include it anyway as it may help understand how these things work -- you may sometimes find computer people talk of "WorldScript" and as those of us working in Non-European languages in the West are very often left to our own devices, a smattering of geekness may probably come in useful.

WorldScript is not a program, you cannot see it (except by inspecting the System folder). Nor does it by itself allow you write Arabic or other scripts; it is rather a common basis for letting Arabic or other scripts operate. So, WorldScript is a part of the Arabic (or Hebrew etc.) package.

Since Apple's usage of "language" and "script" may be confusing, some words about the names may be in order:

The Mac divides the world's languages on two levels: writing systems, or scripts; and (national) languages within scripts. Scripts share a common way of handling text as well as a common set of characters; thus the Arabic script handles writing from right to left, and e.g. the context analysis of letter shapes described above; the Hebrew script also does right-left, but not context analysis; the Chinese and Japanese how to operate their huge character sets, etc. Apple operates in theory with about 12 scripts world-wide; thus Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean and others. [There is in any modern Mac also a product called "AppleScript", but forget it in this context, it has nothing to do with any of this, and it is very bad of Apple to use the same term for two quite different things.]

Thus, a Mac with Arabic has the WorldScript extension plus various specific Arabic system extensions specific for Arabic, plus of course Arabic fonts. You must have all three, Arabic fonts alone are useless without the extensions that make them work as Arabic; Worldscript or fonts are useless without the Arabic-specific extension, and so on. If you add Hebrew, you add the Hebrew-specific extensions and fonts, the same WorldScript takes care of both. Etc., for any other script. Of course, if you let the Installer program handle installation for you, it will put in whatever is required, so it is normally preferably to use a proper Installer program rather than do-it-yourself, as you in the latter case will have to remember all that must be included.

WorldScript comes in two forms; the resources required to handle large character sets like Chinese and Japanese are grouped in the WorldScript II extension, those with character sets of a standard size, inclduding Greek, Arabic and Russian, are grouped in WorldScript I.

Roman is the name of the basic script / writing system that all Macs have; and it covers the languages in Western Europe, including English (all languages that can be written with the normal fonts you get on the Mac). Within each script, each of the languages has its own "language set", which includes a keyboard layout, date and time conventions, how to sort alphabetically etc. Thus, Norwegian, English and German are all languages with the Roman script.

What script rules over the others: the Language Registry

When you install an Arabic system on a Mac, it may be Arabized in three different ways, giving three different levels of Arabic behaviour:

• The most complete is to make everything Arabic, from you turn it on and it says "Marhaban" instead of "Welcome", when all menus and everything on screen is in Arabic. Programs may still use English, but the Finder and System appear in Arabic. That is known as a localized system, all-Arabic.
• Or you can maintain English (or another Western language) as the computer's main language, so that the System and Finder is localized to English, and Arabic becomes an addition.

However, if you do the latter you can still decide whether Arabic or English is dominant, or the "primary" script of the computer. This is because of the special nature of English on the computer. While you normally switch to the particular English (or "Roman" as it is called, i.e. West European) script when you write in English, technically English is also a part of the Arabic script (and all other non-European scripts). This for technical reasons, the programmers can operate in English within Arabic without having to switch to the English script. Thus, even if Arabic dominates the menus, it can still display English characters. Thus you can have,

• Arabic as the dominant script of the Mac, but with menus and Finder localized to English (using English dialogs to speak to you), or
• English as the dominant script, with menus and Finder only displaying English, while Arabic and other scripts only appear inside applications as a font choice alongside the Western fonts.

The last option will be the most common for Western users of Arabic, but it creates certain problem if you use programs made for the Arabic market, where menus etc. are meant to appear in Arabic letters, see below.

The reason why you have this issue of "dominance" in the first place, is because English and Arabic are not the only scripts in the world. Since you can add many different scripts, Hebrew, Russian, Japanese, to the same Macintosh, one of these has to be the one that dominates over the operating system. The system can't handle having some menus in Arabic and some in Chinese, as this may lead to logical inconsistencies. So one script dominates, and this is called the primary script.
In principle, menus and dialog boxes will only be displayed in this primary script, and secondary scripts only inside applications in places which allow you to choose a font. An exception is often the font menu itself, as a font is logically is linked to a particular script anyway; but some programs will display any non-European font names in their own Fonts menus in Chicago, making them unreadable. On the other hand, a program with Arabic as the primary script will also display its menus and dialog boxes in English, as Arabic "includes" English, as we mentioned. You know which script is dominant by noticing which icon appears in the menu line when you turn on the computer, or which keyboards are listed at the top of the keyboards menu.

Thus you end up with three options that all allow you to type in Arabic, but otherwise make the computer behave differently: Arabic dominant + Arabic localized // Arabic dominant + English localized // English dominant + English localized. (Check if you are following us so far: why is the fourth option, English dominant + Arabic localized not possible?) The important element here is which script is the dominant one, as this governs the way the computer works. Localization is mainly a cosmetic matter, whether it is says "File" or "Malaff" on the Finder menu.

In previous versions of the Arabic system, this was an important issue, since there could only be one primary script for the Mac itself and all its programs; which meant that if the primary script was Roman (English) you simply could not use software made in the Middle East which had all its menus in Arabic, you would not be able to read the menus. Therefore, the system included some tools, one control panel from Apple called Script Switcher, or a program called Nisus Script Exchange which allowed you to change the primary script to Arabic (which displayed Arabic menus in Arabic, but could confuse some English programs) or English on restart.

In current versions, this has however been alleviated. Now, in addition to the system itself, each program can have its own primary script, different from that of the Mac overall. Thus, you can have some "Arabic-primary" programs even when the Mac itself and most other programs are English dominated. You tell the Mac which program should run "as if Arabic was the primary script" in a tool called the Arabic Language Registry, which the installer places in the Apple menu of your machine. Registering the application there will make it work with Arabic font menus, in some cases with right-left writing direction as dominant or other settings which was controlled by the primary script of the system.

Second comment: Dominant text direction

By text direction I do not mean which way you write, typing is always from right to left when you use an Arabic font and from left to right in English. But there are other aspects of the order of things which are important. One is alignment of the text, in Arabic you want the right-hand margin to be straight, with lines ending unevenly on the left. Many people "fix" this by setting the word processor to "Align right", which appears to solve this problem. But this only goes a part of the way. What if you want to a first-line indent in a paragraph? The processor will indent the first line on the left, because it believes this to be the beginning of the line, even if it is aligned along the right edge. For this to work, you want to tell the program that no, everything should run right to left; it should mirror-image all controls; indents, tabs and everything.

This becomes even more critical if you have some words in English in the middle of the Arabic text. The Arabic system will allow this, but in order to organize the Arabic and English correctly on the line, it will make a check: <Arabic words 1> should come first, then <English word> and last <Arabic words 2>. Now, since it still believes that the general order of things is from left to right (remember, your typing direction right-left is only within the Arabic block), it will put <Arabic words 1> at the left edge of the line, <English word> in the middle and <Arabic words 2> at the right. Exactly the opposite of what you want.

Hence the need to determine the overall writing direction of the program. Registering the program as Arabic in the Language Registry may work for some programs. But many of the programs that are especially adapted for Arabic will also allow you to do this within the program, often (like Nisus and WinText) with a large arrow on the ruler that you click to change from right to left or back. Whenever you do so, all settings, margins, tabs and indents switch over to its mirror image and back again. And, importantly in a mixed-language text, both allow you do this for each particular paragraph as well as the whole document, so your paragraphs with Arabic quotes appear properly from the right, while the rest of the English text is not affected by the Arabic choices. Other smaller programswill allow it only for the document as a whole (and the Language registry for the whole program, all you do with it).

But many programs that do not know about this will not have such an option. Sometimes (like in Microsoft Word etc.) there is nothing you can do about it; but many others that allow Arabic will take its text directionality from the Text control panel. In that case, choose Right-to-left in the control panel, and you will see the mirror imaging on a global scale. Remember that this is dynamic, when you switch back again, all will be reversed in the programs that base themselves on the Text cp.

Unicode under OS 8 and OS 9

The Mac has actually already included some elements looking towards Unicode from system OS 8, with greater use under OS 9. Thus, you will find in the keyboards menu two items saying "Unicode", but you will also find them always to be grey, that is inaccessible. That is because in order to utilize Unicode, which is a way more complex set-up than WorldScript or other current language adaptations, the application programs will have to be reprogrammed. Until today, basically no program has taken the plunge. Those that have approached the issue are primarily some Internet programs for email or web browsing, and what they do is to "translate" emails and web pages that are written in Unicode to the normal Mac systems and fonts; so what you see in Arabic on your screen is standard Mac Arabic. For this, they use a system extension called "TEC" (Text Encoding Convertor) which appeared in OS 8.0, and was required from OS 8.1, although not of much practical use at that early stage. (As far as I know, TEC can be used already under OS 7.5.x, but there have been different versions of it, and the more recent system versions are likely to be more applicable.)

What TEC does, then is to convert text "on the fly", that is automatically, not only between between current Mac ways of handling scripts and the future Unicode system, but also between different current character systems, including between Windows and Mac versions of Arabic and many other scripts - as long as TEC is able to recognize what script the text is supposed to be in. It is thus basically a tool for adapting the new to the current and old. Programs that want to write text directly in the universal Unicode, rather than the current WorldScript systems, must interact directly with Apple's Unicode system through a module called "ATSUI". Neither Nisus nor other regular Mac programs do that yet, so you cannot write in Unicode at the moment.

[For more on Unicode as it appeared in OS X, see the regular Arabic FAQ]

Keyboards, "Arabic Transliterated", and "Arabic Portable"?

In the ALK and later versions of Arabic (in the Language CD Extras folder in OS 9, see above), Apple has added a keyboard layout which they call "Arabic QWERTY", which follows the English keyboard: if you press the English A key, you get alif, B give ba, etc. It still requires some learning of where the emphatics and hamza etc. are, but it may be quicker to learn than the standard, unless you are familiar with that. Drag the Arabic-Qwerty file to your System folder, and you will see it as an option in the "flag menu", alongside "Arabic" and "Arabic portable". -- Notice that a change of keyboards (among those of the same script) in the keyboards menu on the menu line is temporary, only lasting for this session. Changes made in the Keyboards control panel (switch script to see the relevant ones) are remembered also after turning off and on the computer. Previously, independents like myself also tried our hands at this, and I include on my web page an alternative transliterated keyboard (on the basis of work by my colleague Albrecht Hofheinz). Some people may find it useful, others not; it is there if you want it. You may find it more familiar if you are a user of the Jaghbub transliteration fonts, as it partly follows this layout. (Click here to download).

The standard "Arabic Portable" layout, by the way, is what it says, made for the Portables. With the correct setting, the number keys on the top row of the main keyboard operate differently from those on the keypad at the right of the keyboard; one enters numbers right-left, the other left-right. But the Portable doesn't have a keypad. Therefore, this layout instead places the "keypad" behaviour under the top row numbers when pressing Option. It is otherwise identical, and you don't really need it if you don't have a Portable, but it does no harm either.

Why is the Arabic icon in menu bar grey when I have installed Arabic?

If you must have Arabic names on your files, you can choose an Arabic font for lists and icons in the Finder. Open the Views (OS 7) or Appearance Manage (OS 8-9) and choose an Arabic font for lists and/or icons. Notice that you cannot, apparently not even under OS 9 themes, select an Arabic font for menus or window title bars. (If you have OS 7, you may have to install Apple's Language Kit Extension (part of the Arabic Language Kit package), in order to see Arabic fonts in the Views control panel.)

Another common problem which isn't one, is that (under English dominance), Arabic names appear as gibberish in the menu of many programs, including the Font menu of Microsoft Word. This is not a problem; it is simply that, as described above, these programs (and the System) will only use the Chicago font [or its Roman alternatives in OS 9] in menus as well as dialog boxes, and as Chicago does not, of course, contain any Arabic characters, so anything written in Arabic is illegible. But it still works when you choose one of these fonts. In order to read such Arabic text, you must register the program as Arabic in the Language Registry [may not work with all programs].

What known bugs and problems are there for the Arabic Mac?

Notice that Apple warns of an incompatibility between WorldScript I (that is, including Arabic) and the ATM Deluxe 4.5 font management utility. I am now running OS 9 with various Adobe products (Acrobat etc.) that previously required ATM, but seemingly no longer do so, so it may be that ATM is no longer as important as it was. In any case, notice this possible cause for problems, and avoid version 4.5 of ATM.

However - and this is the bug - the Nisus installer does not work properly under 7.5.1. So, what you must do, is:
- Remove the file "System 7.5 Update" from the System folder and restart.
- Reinstall the Arabic resources from the Nisus Language Key disks.
- Put back the System 7.5 Update file. (It is only the Installer program itself that doesn't like it).

This may or not apply also to Systems 7.5.2 and higher. If you have problems with such a System, try this method also on it.

Solution: For the moment, there isn't really any proper way around the bug, except perhaps to replace all "t"s with something strange, such as "$$$" in the original file, if you still have it, and then change all "$$$"s back into "t"s when you have got it into Nisus, escaping the bug. Apart from this, if the file originally came from Microsoft Word or MacWrite, and if you have or can get hold of an older version of Nisus, such as 3.4, open the document in this version and save it again. This will import OK, because in version 3.4, Nisus didn't use xtnd for Word or MacWrite, and it will be saved as a proper Nisus file, which can then be read with NisusWriter 4. Notice that this problem only refers to formatted texts, if you import from an unformatted text-only file, the t's are all in place.