Den 14. feb. 2011 kl. 18:35 skrev Erik Richard Sørensen:

> Knut S. Vikør wrote:
>> 
>> All in all, it behaves exactly as if it ignores Unicode and only
>> supports the old 8bit Macintosh character set. It is one of very few
>> applications I can see today where not even the Arabic keyboard is
>> accessible. Very very old.
> 
> Hm, I can see the problems, but have you tried to use 'Arabic QWERTY' instead of the 'Arabic Extended'?

Arabic Qwerty is also greyed out and unavailable, while US Extended is available. Russian, Chinese and Japanese are there, but not Hebrew, Devangari, Armenian (qwerty or not).


> - But no matter which keyboard I choose for any of the Semittic languages they are all chosable when MW is open here using OS X 10.5.8...
> 
> It might also have something to do with the fonts chosen. I normally only use UTF-8 compatible .ttf or TT fonts containing both upper and lower ASCII.

.ttf fonts are either "Windows" (.ttf) or OpenType (.otf, but very often also use the extension .ttf). On the Mac, we cannot use Arabic Windows TrueType, but we can use Arabic OpenType from OS 10.5 and up (depending on application). In Mariner, the behaviour is like this, when we copy Arabic text into it:
- OpenType fonts: characters become question marks, typical of an app that cannot display the Unicode characters with charset IDs beyond the app's 8bit range of ID number 0-255. 
- Apple Arabic fonts: characters are converted to what we used to call "high ASCII", chars in the range ID 128-255, which is where Arabic characters were located in pre-Unicode times. These fonts thus both have a Unicode character table that Mac OS uses, but has also retained the old Mac Arabic (8bit) charset table, which Mariner can recognize and use. However, Mariner has put in a block against these fonts and displays the text instead in the default Lucida Grande, where these characters according to the IDs of these values in their (Western) table, as punctuation marks. Once in Mariner, you cannot choose Baghdad etc. for the pasted text, the app rejects the font choice.
- Old Apple Persian fonts I have kept (Kamran, Astana): The same thing, except that Mariner does not have a positive block against these fonts, so here you do see Arabic characters in Mariner. But Mariner cannot do right-to-left, so the characters are displayed in reversed order left-right, and disconnected.
Hebrew works in the same way, question marks or converted to Lucida Grande Western characters. 

I don't have any fully non-Unicode Arabic fonts left on my Mac to test, but probably they would work as my Persian fonts, in Mariner they would work as under Classic, obeying to the Mac upper ASCII charset. But since Mariner cannot do right-to-left, I do not see how you could actually type Arabic in it, even if you created a special keyboard for the purpose. You certainly cannot type in Nisus or other and paste into Mariner, since the two systems are just not compatible, Mac being Unicode and Mariner not.   

> 
> If I fx. copy & paste a Semittic text - Arabic, Hebrew, Iraq, Urdu or any other Semittic text, it's correct that most of the time it just become standard Mac characters, but then I just 'Select All' and choose one of my prefered .ttf/TT fonts for the specific language. - Most of what I get of that kind of text I get from Windows based computers still using the UTF-8, so maybe that's why I normally don't have any problems...

OK, it seems that you are using some Windows ttf fonts with a Windows charset. As Windows ttf fonts do not work for Arabic, I do not have any such to test with; but they could behave as the old Persian above, i.e. they would display Hebrew characters according to their 8bit charset code, as they would have done under Classic. Also, if you use Hebrew "visual" rather than "logical" order, as was sometimes done in that language, you could get around the program's inability to do right-left scripts, again not possible in Arabic. Although the fonts may themselves be Unicode-compatible (like my Persian), Mariner does not use the Unicode table, but the older Mac/Windows Hebrew 8bit-table for display, if the font contains such. So it is the fonts that contain the double information, not Mariner, and your particular setup has masked MarinerWrite's shortcomings in Unicode. Anyway, more kudos to Nisus (and all the other programs that have moved beyond this). 

Knut