Its handling of Arabic is excellent. In general, you can do anything in Arabic or in mixed Arabic/English (or with any other script) that you can do in English alone. It has a script direction icon which causes the ruler to become mirror-imaged to right-left when you click on it; on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. Finding / replacing complicated demands where one part of what you look for is in Arabic and another in English isn't always as easy as in English alone; but you mostly can do it. There are special options that only appear if you have Arabic installed, such as e.g. optionally finding alif-madda and alif-hamza when you are asking for alif alone. If you select the whole document and change the font to "Geneva"; only the English parts will change, the Arabic will remain in the Arabic font (unlike other programs, where this will change everything to Geneva, making the Arabic unreadable). A very useful tool for people who lay out Arabic poetry is a "stretch tab" that inserts a keshida that lengthens a verse up to the tab stop, so you get properly aligned hemistiches.

The older versions were copy protected with a "language key" you attached your Mac for non-European scripts, but this was removed with version 5 (and is no longer sold, although the earlier version 4.1.6 is still available as free download. This free version will thus not work with non-European scripts. There may still be one restriction: If you have a Hebrew system running under Hebrew primary script, or a version of Nisus sold in Israel, you may still need the dongle as the the Israeli distributor refused to sell it otherwise. If you do need Hebrew, make sure that the English script is the primary start-up script. This only concerns Hebrew, no other language). Nisus may still also sell Apple's language kits for the various scripts, which Apple itself has discontinued, which you will need for systems older than OS 9.

There is one bug that is serious for people interacting with Windows users: If you import formatted Arabic text from another program (MacWrite, Word, WordPerfect), all "t"'s will disappear and be replaced with spaces. This isn't really Nisus's fault - they use a standard Mac import/export module (called XTND) that many programs share, and which is not Arabic-aware - but it is crippling. However, importing unformatted text-only files will not cause this to happen. If you have a MacWrite or Word text which you must have with formats intact into Nisus, you have to first import it into the earlier version of Nisus, 3.48 (which does not have this bug for Word and MacWrite files), and then save it in Nisus format and open it in NisusWriter 4 or 5.

A drawback with Nisus (more noticeable earlier, when lean programs still existed) is that it requires a bit of memory to work well. While you can get by with giving it the standard 3-4 MB memory, do not expect it to handle anything of any size with that. For a normal workload, it is better to be able to allot 12-20 MB to the Nisus application. As for older machines, Nisus will barely open on older 68030 machines, while it works fine on 68040's and any version of old or modern PowerMacs.

For those machines that could and can use it, handling of non-European text is otherwise good; you can mark the various passages as belonging to separate languages; and the relevant spelling checker dictionaries and hyphenation rules are applied each to its own languague. (Nisus now has the same feature, as do I believe Word, but WinText was early at this). Version 2.6 crashed under some current system configurations.

WinText made it to version 2.7.5, which in 2001 is still on sale and is compatible with OS 9 (or mostly so, it crashes the Mac every time I quit it, but that may be me). This version adds one very useful addition: it has an Arabic spelling checker, the only one I have ever seen on a Mac. Wintext used to be copy protected with a key disk. Version 2.7.5 comes on a CD, but still includes an key disk (an 800K disk), which according to the documentation is required for installation. As modern Macs have no option to read 800K diskettes (all third-party floppy disk drives read High-Density 1.4M disks only), that would present a problem. Happily, the producer has recognized this, and the program actually installs without need of the key disk. Version 2.7.5 supports XTND exports, so you can export new and old WinText documents directly to e.g. Nisus, using Nisus's XTND filter. This may be useful for those people who have migrated from WinText to Nisus and have some 'orphaned' WinText files they have lost access to. (PageMaker ME, made by the same company, also reads WinText files). However, time seems to have passed WinText by, and while the producer Winsoft still sells it (upgrades for $50), they do not seem to market it very actively any longer.

These don't (really) work

The Trouble with Microsoft Word.

In what many still consider to be the best version of Word for Mac, version 5, you can type a few words in Arabic, however, with some limitations: One is that justification doesn't work. If there is an Arabic word on the line, you will see a "gap" in the justification. This is because Word calculates the width of the Arabic letter on the basis of its ASCII value, which is the same irrespective of the actual shape of the letter form (glyph). E.g., 'j' has ASCII value 204 whether it is displayed in the initial, medial or final form, and Word will look at the character that occupies slot nr. 204 in the Arabic font (the isolate form of the character) when it calculates how wide the line in question is, and how to justify it. Since the isolate 'j' is broader than the initial or medial forms, this leads Word to think that the line is longer in numbers of pixels than it is really is, and the line with Arabic in it will most often appear shorter than the one above or below. In left-aligned text, this is of course irrelevant, as lines are of unequal length anyway.

You will normally find that you can type Arabic OK in Word 5, but you cannot edit the text: the selection and indication (blacking out) of a text does not relate to its actual location, but to where it "would have been" if the Arabic text had run left-to-right, and all glyphs had had the width of the isolate forms (the ASCII value). Also, putting the cursor in a word element will often lead it to break up into invidual characters; the same will often happen if the text runs from one line to another. Again, these are clearly processes that Word generates internally: Generally, when Word (or another program) uses the Mac System's TextEdit resources, Arabic will work OK; whenever the programmers have written procedures specifically for that program, Arabic will not work. This is why the smallest text editors most often work best with Arabic, as they rely directly on the System resources.

Word 98 has the same basic level of (lack of) support. It does not suffer from the same justification issue, and selecting now "hits" correctly. On the other hand, while it will allow each word to be typed right to left, it will not allow a sentence, or any string of words, to come right to left. Each individual word appears to the right of the previous one, like in English. In other words, it does not recognize the "Arabic space character". You can force it to do so but using Option-space, but this leaves far too wide a space between the words. So, you must type the words in backwards, the last first and the first last. Not very useful.

Desktop publishing

• AraMedia
• Fontworld
• Diwan
• Glyph systems

Other types of programs

Otherwise, for databases, Arabic will work with 4th Dimension, for a separate review of this, click here. WinFile, a smaller flat-file database made by the same company as WinText, appeears to have disappeared some years ago.

HyperCard works well with Arabic. There were certain versions (around 2.0 I think) that had some problems with the display of Arabic, but with recent versions that is cleared up, and from vs. 2.3, the standard English HyperCard will allow text processing of Arabic without problems, and will sort Arabic text according to the Arabic alphabet (you may have to use either the "sort" or "sort international" commandd, depending on your precise system setup). Recommended.

Excel will work with Arabic. It would be a lie to say it works well, but you can type Arabic text into cells and have them display correctly, although you are typing "blindly". It will not sort correctly under English dominance, but probably will do so under Arabic dominance (tested in Excel 4).

Some graphics programs will also do so, with various limits. FreeHand 3, e.g. (the newest I have) allows you easily to type and edit Arabic text, but may have some trouble with proper alignment - this may be indicative of the level of support you will find in various programs. My old SuperPaint (3), however, handles Arabic without problem - on the machines that it can run on. In general, the rule applies that the stronger the program, the less compatible it is likely to be with Arabic. For graphic programs that do not handle Arabic by themselves, notice the Kalimat utility mentioned above that intends to add Arabic capability to these (using their own fonts). I have not tested this, but it may be of use for those in need.

There is a separate Arabic version of Adobe Photoshop 6, as well as an Adobe Acrobat ME, from the same company that sells Adobe PageMaker ME (above).

You do not need the Middle East version of Acrobat in order to produce Acrobat files containing Arabic. Regular English Acrobat will do so, however you must use the "Distiller" process, not the simpler "PDF Writer" in the same package. Using this produces Arabic pdf files that can, like any Acrobat file, be viewed on any computer, Mac or Windows, without any Arabic installed on that computer (I believe the user must have Acrobat Reader version 3.0 or higher, however). The caveat is that Arabic pdf pages produced with English Acrobat cannot be searched or have the text copied out of like English pdf files; for these extras to work, the file must have been made in the more expensive Acrobat ME version.

Arabic on the Internet

History lesson: Al-Kaatib