Jaghbub for OS X Upgrade

After the introduction of OS X, some programs began to to have problems with the Jaghbub fonts, such as Microsoft Word in its "2004" version. Some characters did not appear, or the font itself was unavailable. This is because Jaghbub was not compatible with OS X's new font system, which is called the "Unicode" system.

For this reason, I have upgraded the Jaghbub package to OS X compatibility, so that you can continue using it in Word, NisusWriter Pro/Express, and other new programs. However, OS X does complicate things a little. There are now two different "Jaghbub" fonts, alike but with different uses. You can install both, or just one or the other. Your choice depends on what your purpose is:

I: I want to read my old Jaghbub documents in Word

This is the most basic need: We want to get access to all our old and existing documents that we over the years have written with Jaghbub and its "sister" fonts, also on our new machine and in Word 2004. To do so, dump the old Jaghbub font (if you have it), and install the new one, "Jaghbub for OS X" instead. Bingo, your old documents are available, and you can display and use them as before.

-- Or, pretty much. Microsoft has, unfortunately, just to confuse us, made a twist concerning the long a (a with line above). See below for more details on how to circumvent that annoying problem.--

Download Jaghbub for OS X

> See also below for details of installing fonts, if you are unsure about how to do this.

II. I want to send Jaghbub documents to Windows

However, the OS X system can do more for us. We have always had problems with those of our colleagues who have chosen to use Windows; or publishers that require us to submit to their diktat. Our documents did not survive transfer to them. Now, those problems can be resolved, because OS X's "Unicode" system is shared by Windows, so if we conform to that, we can send documents, with full transliteration, back and forth without problem.

Jaghbub did not follow Unicode (which did not exist in its time), and therefore Jaghbub for X does not either. So we cannot use this font for that purpose. Instead, I have created another font, which is a Jaghbub according to Unicode; I have called it "JaghbUni".

Download the JaghbUni font

The JaghbUni keyboard: American Diacs

JaghbUni looks like Jaghbub and has the same characters, but it - and Unicode - is quite different in its internal setup, so you cannot just change the font of your document, nor can you type in JaghbUni with the old US Diacs keyboard. I have instead created a new, parallel keyboard layout for use with JaghbUni (and its sisters, "KoufrUni" and "BairUni"). It works pretty much like US Diacs: You press Option and s to get s with dot under, Option and i to i with line above, etc. - but only in JaghbUni and other Unicode fonts, not in Jaghbub.
The American version of this new keyboard layout is called "American Diacs", see below for installation details.

III: Other neat things with Jaghbub

Sending old Jaghbub documents to Windows users

So this new JaghbUni fonts allows us to type new documents, with the new keyboard, and send those to Windows users. Fine. What about all the old documents I have, can I now send these also to Windows with everything OK?
Well, not just like that. "Old Jaghbub" (and Jaghbub for X) uses a different system, so Windows users will not be able to read them. What we can do, however, is to convert our old Jaghbub documents to fit the new layout. The simplest way is just to do a series of Find & Replace commands, and I have created a simple Word 2004 macro that converts all old Jaghbub diacritics to the new JaghbUni ones. Run this macro, change the font to JaghbUni, save it with a new name, and send it off to Windows just like the docs you typed directly into JaghbUni.
I have also made similar macros for NisusWriter, Mellel and BB Edit. All of these tools are in the same folder:

Download the conversion tools and additional keyboards folder

Jaghbub for Windows

I have actually also made Windows-compatible versions of both Jaghbub for X and JaghbUni. These are under testing, since I do not myself have Windows. But they should now make it possible for a Windows user to install Jaghbub on his machine and read your old files without conversion. How useful that is, remains to be seen. A colleague of mine has also created a Word for Windows keyboard routine for Jaghbub so such users can also type in it. All enclosed in the files below.
Windows JaghbUni should work like other Unicode fonts on the PC; but contains the characters important for us; not just in a Times-like, but also in Palatino- and Helvetica-based fonts.

Download Jaghbub for Windows
Download JaghbUni for Windows

Downloading and installation

Thus, these files are available for download:

JaghbubWin.zip : Contains the fonts Jaghbub, Bairut and Koufra. Can be used on Mac and Windows.
JaghbUniWin.zip : Contains the fonts JaghbUni, BairUni and KoufrUni.
JaghbAdd.zip : Contains keyboards for various nationalities (US, Norwegian etc.), the conversion tools, and other related files

Mac suitcase versions:

JaghbubX.zip : Contains the fonts Jaghbub, Bairut, and Koufra in OS X-compatible versions, and the old keyboard US Diacs, as older Mac suitcase files. Most Mac programs recognize these, but a number of modern programs require the "Win" (non-suitcase) fonts above, so it is better to use those on current (OX 10.x) Macs as well.
JaghbUni.zip : Contains the Unicode fonts JaghbUni, BairUni, and KoufrUni, and keyboard American Diacs.

-- Older versions of StuffIt Expander have problems with zip files. If you find e.g. that the folder you downloaded appears to be empty, either upgrade StuffIt Expander to the current version, or use Safari to download; Safari does not have these problems.
-- If you use Classic/OS9 and want the old Jaghbub files, zip files may not work. If so, go to the file index and pick out the relevant .hqx files instead. These are older, pre-Unicode fonts. NB: these will not open in OS X--

Installation of the fonts

If you already have the old Jaghbub font, remove it before installing the new one. I recommend making Jaghbub, but not JaghbUni available for Classic programs.
-- If you are familiar with installing fonts under OS X, skip ahead to "installation of keyboards" below.

Excursion: Installing fonts under OS X

In OS X, you can either install fonts "manually", but putting the fonts in their correct folder, or use the program FontBook which does the same thing for you. If you find it confusing with all the various Fonts folder on your machine, you may want to locate FontBook on your hard disk, and use its helping hand.

Installing with FontBook
- Open the FontBook programme [it is normally located in a folder called "Utilities"].
- It will display a list of installed fonts. If you can see the names Jaghbub, Bairut and Koufra (the old versions), select them, and choose Remove fonts from the File menu: (Do not click "Deactivate fonts", as that does not fully remove the old fonts, and the Mac can confuse them with the new versions).
- Choose File: Add fonts, and select the new JaghbubX (BairutX, etc.) fonts that you downloaded. Click on the button: Install fonts: For Mac OS 9 (Classic). This allows both Classic applications and OS X applications to use these fonts.
- When you see the fonts appear in the list of installed fonts, quit FontBook. If you have Word or other programs open, quit them and reopen, so that they get to notice the new fonts.

To install JaghbUni etc., of course the same "Add fonts" procedure, but this time click on Install fonts: For all users (or "for myself only", if you are the only user of your machine, that comes to the same thing).

Manual installation of the fonts
All FontBook does, is to move the font files in and out of the Fonts folders, so you may also just do that yourself, as we used to do in the old days. The only confusing thing is that there are actually four different "Fonts" folders (at least) on any OS X machine, so we must keep track of which is the correct folder.

They are:
- For JaghbubX (and its "sisters"; BairutX and KoufraX), the Fonts folder in System Folder (9) - this may have a different name on your machine, but is the folder with a 9 on its icon.
- For JaghbUni (and its sisters), either of the Fonts folder that sits in a folder called "Library". There are two of them, one for all users - click on the hard disk icon, and you will see the Library folder - and another in your "home" folder, just for your account. It comes to the same thing, if you are the only user of your Mac, so put the fonts in either. (In OS X, you cannot add Fonts to the System folder (X) itself, nor do you need to).

Usually, you should quit and restart Word or any other application, so that they get to register the new fonts.

Installation of the keyboard layouts

Existing users of Jaghbub know that you must use a special keyboard layout in order to use Jaghbub in a logical fashion. Jaghub for X uses the same US Diacs keyboard as before, so if you already have that in your "flag" (keyboards) menu, you need nothing new for Jaghbub.

For JaghbUni, then, you do need to add something new, and here you must do the process "manually":

(1) Place the keyboard layout files you have downloaded into the folder called "Keyboard Layouts" in one of your Library folders (see above; again it, does not much matter which one). The files you should put there are:

- USDiacs.rsrc (if you do not have this before), for Jaghbub. It is the same old US Diacs keyboard, but notice that the file must have the .rsrc part to the name.
- American Diacs.keylayout for JaghbUni, together with:
- American Diacs.icns - The icns file is just the menu icon; these two must have the same name and be in the same folder.
(Europeans: substitute your nationality for "American", see below)

(2) Then you must log out and log in again, for the Mac to take notice of the change.
(3) After login, open System Preferences : International, and click the Keyboards button.
(4) Scroll down the list of possible keyboards, find the new ones, US and/or American, and click the check mark beside each one. Close the panel.
You will now see the layouts you chose added to the keyboards ("flag") menu of the menu bar. Choose it when writing in the relevant font(s).

-- American Diacs is a Unicode keyboard and is greyed out in programs that do not understand Unicode, including Word for X (the 2001 version) and various other older OS X programs; so these cannot use JaghbUni anyway; Jaghbub only for those.

-- Europeans and others: I have made keyboard layouts for Jaghbub (.rsrc files) and JaghbUni / Unicode (.keylayout files) suited to the following national keyboard standards: French, German, Italian, UK English, Danish, Swedish* and Norwegian*. Install them in the same manner as described for American above. With each are pdf files showing the keys, as well as a table of the Jaghbub diacritics
      * For Norwegians and Swedes: In Jaghbub, you do not need any separate keyboard, so there are no Classic (.rsrc) keyboards for you; but you do need a separate keyboard layout for Unicode fonts, thus you have to install those, just like the other nationals.

-- To install the ConvertMacros, you must open the file with that name; it contains further instruction. You will be warned that the file contains macros, click on "Enable macros" in order to get access to them.

What the fonts contain

If you are not familiar with the Jaghbub font, click here to find out what it basically is and contains.

Jaghbub for X contains exactly the same as old Jaghbub; once installed, you will not notice the difference. The fonts have the same menu names as the old ones, Jaghbub, Bairut and Koufra.

The old system, which Jaghbub was created under, restricts the number of characters it can contain (to ca. 220). Unicode, and thus JaghbUni, has no such restraint. While JaghbUni basically reproduces the same characters as Jaghbub, diacritics for transliterating Arabic, I have been able to add a few more characters than in Jaghbub. It includes, in addition:

• All standard Macintosh special letters and symbols that had to be removed from Jaghbub (copyright, per-thousand, check mark, etc.; all "MacRoman")
• All "Latin1" characters, such as Icelandic eth and thorn, which old MacRoman did not have.
• Some more letters with caron (hajek) besides g, thus c, s and z. Proper yumucak g now exists in all three fonts, in addition to g with caron.
• Among "loose diacritics" that can be used with any character: two dots below, line below
• Y with circonflex, used by Spaniards for Arabic "j".
• A few letters that happened to be available, such as L slashed and Y acute.
• Some characters for Hausa and Fulani that I previously put in a separate font (Kaduna); hooked k, b, and d. These are only in JaghbUni, not in KoufrUni and BairUni; the only difference between Jaghbub and its sisters (as Kaduna was based on Times/Jaghbub only).

Caveats and restrictions

Microsoft Word and the long a.

Everything in Jaghbub X is a simple upgrade, except for one thing: Microsoft has messed up one character, the a with line above (a/macron). The short of it is:

• If you open a Jaghbub document from Word 5 or older in Word 2004, there is no problem.
• If you import an old Jaghbub document into any other program than Word 2004, there is no problem.
• If you copy text from a window in Word 98 or Word 2001 (i.e. in Classic) to a window in Word 2004, using cut and paste, there is no problem. However:
• If you open a Jaghbub document saved in Word 98, Word 2001 or Word for X with Word 2004, the a/macron is converted to a different character.
         I have twisted JaghbubX so that it will still display as a long a. But it is a fake; it is actually a different character from the long a you type with the keyboard. So if you try find & replace one of the old a's, it will not find it (nor will it display in any other application). You can still use the document, but if you are going to go on editing it, it is recommended to convert the "fake" long a's to proper Jaghbub, to avoid future confusion.
  
  You can use the macro JaghbubLongA which is in the macros file; or copy one of the fake a's into the Find box, and then do a Find/Replace All with the proper long a.
  -- The cut and paste workaround will work if you "cut" while in the Classic enviroment, i.e. still have Word 98 or 2001 on your machine, and "paste" into a Word 2004 document; then the false conversion is not done. -- This will thus not work from Word X to Word 2004, which are both OS X programs, but if you are desparate, a couple of remote tricks: from Word for X, save the document in Word 5.1 format ("Save As") and open the result in Word 2004; or: if you still have a copy of Word 98 or 2001 around, open the Word for X file with it - formatting should be preserved - and copy/paste into a Word 2004 window. However, if you do not have any of these old versions of Word on your new machine, use the macro or Find-Replace as indicated above. You can also type the fake Jaghbub a using the American Diacs keyboard and typing Option-m and then a.

"Independent" diacritics

• Notice that under Unicode, independent, or "loose" diacritics (those not bound to a, i, u, etc.) are written after the letter they are to sit over, not before as we used to. JaghbUni conforms to this, while JaghbubX conforms to the old system.
  
• In JaghbUni, TextEdit and some other applications automatically centres and raises/lowers such diacritics above their "chair". Thus, there you need not use the "upper-case" versions of these; you can just use the regular ("lower-case") diacritic and let the computer position it; or pick the version that gives the most pleasing result.
  Word 2004 is not among these applications, unfortunately, here you must use the upper-case diacritic for upper case letters. But in the screen fonts of a few weights (12 point KoufrUni Roman, JaghbUni Bold, BairUni), two of these do not combine properly: high dot above and high caron above. In other weightes the two appear, but are not well placed. Not something I can influence, but dot above and caron above "for upper case" do not work very well in 12pt in many applications.

Quality of screen fonts

• The print fonts look fine to me. However, the screen fonts may behave in strange manners
  • Under Classic, there is no difference; Jaghbub looks just as it used to.
  • In OS X, there are anything from excellent, to a minor degradation, to fairly ugly, depending on machine (sceen), program, and your screen setting (see "smoothing" just below). In most cases, the result is as good as old Jaghbub, or OK, or at least livable, the ugliest font being Bairut Bold. As far as I can see, there is no way for me to influence or improve these results. Hopefully, with newer machines these screen fonts issues will go away; anyway, in sizes larger than 12 the quality is generally good.
  • One annoying thing, however, concerns Koufra and KoufrUni Roman (none of the others) on some screens: the lines above the long vowels appear so thin as to be invisible in smaller than ca. 18 pt. They are there, and will print fine, but are out of sight on-screen. This occurs because of a system feature called "text smoothing"; for some reason, it smoothes this particular line down to invisible. If this occurs to you and is a problem, go to System Preferences : Appearance, and set the value for "Text smoothing" to the highest alternative, 12 pt. That will make diacritics look more jagged, but at least you can see the line above vowels in Koufra up to 12 pt.
  • In Word 2004 (only), o/macron (long o) may appear too wide in Jaghbub X, 12 pt. May or may not be a problem for you, but take notice when printing out o/macron.
• As in any new font, notice that in print there will be very minor differences in space between lines (and to a lesser degree words). These will not be noticeable to the naked eye unless you compare it with an older printout, but notice that - in my tests - a 20-page text printed in new Jaghbub may take up anything from half a line to 3-4 lines more than in old Jaghbub. The difference is similar to, or smaller than, e.g. the difference between Times and Times New Roman, two variants of "the same" font on our Macs. But it should be noticed if you are trying to reproduce exactly the layout of a previously printed book or article; you will have to be careful with the line spacing ("leading").

Mellel

• In Mellel, you should turn off the function Character Appearance : Ligatures (in the format palette) when using Jaghbub X, otherwise it will replace all "fi" combinations (fine, find, Sufi) with 'ayn (which it believes to be a "fi" ligature).

Knut S. Vikør