So it seems like the best, most reliable low/no cost solution to Alex's problem is to have a copy of Inkscape handy. it might lack style and finesse but it looks like Notepad has applied those joins perfectly. Ouch.įor fun, since TextEdit on Mac apparently has no trouble, let's try smelly old Windows Notepad:

Perfectly presented real inline text the moment it is pasted in. Inkscape (free open source Illustrator rival): It's possible there's some setting somewhere that needs to be applied, but given that Scribdoor charged €100 to bring this feature to InDesign, I doubt it. Indesign (UK editions, CS4, CS5 and CS6):Īlso doesn't look right, same problems way as Illustrator. Arabic joins not being applied (plus it looks like it hasn't figured out that this should be right-to-left text). Illustrator (UK editions, CS4, CS5 and CS6):ĭoesn't look right. Here's the original from Wikipedia as a screenshot image for comparison: Here's a side-by-side comparison of the Arabic word for Arabic ( العربية), copied and pasted into a variety of applications with default settings, with suggested best approach at the end. The software doesn't treat it as Arabic text, but the characters you are pasting are the correct joined forms of the characters. Basically, it seems to forcibly replace the characters with their appropriate joined ligatures. You'll also need to set it to right-align. So, if you need to edit the Arabic text, I'd recommend doing the edits in a separate word processor, then copy into the above site, then copy into Illustrator. Note that illustrator still treats it like it's left-to-right text, so while it looks correct, editing it will feel strange if you normally type in Arabic.

one of the web safe standard fonts - Verdana, Times, Georgia, Arial. If it just pastes boxes, make sure a font that supports Arabic characters is selected, e.g. Type or copy your text into the top box on, then copy and paste the output text in the bottom box into Illustrator, and it seems to keep the joins correctly applied and the text appears the correct way round. Edit 2: There are better answers than mine - look at Andaleeb / Kurio's answers and the comments.Įdit: Thanks to Supamike in this question about this problem in Photoshop there's what looks like a simpler solution that also works in Illustrator for point text (it screws up if you have area text that spans more than one line, so you need to use point text then manually put line breaks in and re-order the lines of text, else the first line is at the bottom and the last is at the top).

Adobe illustrator portable mac