Arabic design

[NMS]

I have a problem....any help is very important!

We are designing a brochure in Arabic. The translators gave us the text on MS Word. We use Adobe Pagemaker as a publisher and the arabic text cannot be pasted into this. We have tried to create an image using photoshop first but the text conversion is not identical. We have tried to use psp but the text direction is changed. when i try to convert the doc into rtf, the direction of the arabic text is lost.

How can we go ahead with this brochure...what software shall we use???

Thank you for your help and comments.

[Jade Dragon]

A quick way to catch the image of your text is to "Print-Screen" on windows computers. This will screencap your entire desktop into "clip-board" then you can "paste" the image into any picture editor as a "new image". Not sure what the capture is for Mac.

I would think that Pagemaker would have a language pak. I haven't used it in years though. ~ just checked they only have a euro update, not sure if it will have arabic.

Well I hope this works for you.

Good Luck.

[alphadesk]

Neville,

Get with powweb member kvk007 http://omanserv.com/
He is from Oman and can probably help you with this.

[rainbore]

Neville,

You might want to look into Adobe Acrobat, or at least look at converting your MS-Word document into a .pdf document. Web browsers will be able to view the Arabic document using the Adobe plug-in. I can understand if your project doesn't justify buying Adobe Acrobat. Word might be able to output to .pdf on its own, or you can see if there's a utility available on www.download.com to handle it. And I seem to recall that the last time I checked into this, there's a trial version of Acrobat available at adobe.com that will let you make a half-dozen documents at no charge, which is probably the best option short of buying the software outright.

Good luck!

[NMS]

We have the licence for the Abode acrobat however this is not what we need. We are designing a brochure for printing using Adobe Pagemaker. The arabic text was sent to us on a word document. The problem is how to transfer this text into the pagemaker without loosing its structure.

THanks

[Ruvy]

I think there are two problems 1 charachters and 2 direction. It is the same problem we have in Hebrew. As long as your site does not have a nationalistic nature or promote hatred you are welcome to use this link http://logicsoft.netvision.net.il/ - they have a package that converts Hebrew Word to HTML. I think both the Hebrew and Arabic function in a simmilar way. You may have to decide if you want to use Arabic iso logic or Araabic iso visual. Try it both way.
I am not sure if this package is available in languages other than Hebrew but I am sure they will be glad to help if you need it

Ruvy

[NMS]

The link you gave is not working. Anyway I don't need to change my text into html...This is not for web design but graphic design.

[Jade Dragon]

You mentioned creating an "image" of the text through potoshop or psp. I use psp, if you open your text in word then "screen cap" the page you can paste into psp. It does create a Hi-res picture you can then manipulate to your own chosing. psp also has a screen cap method you can set up.

once in psp then you can break out the background if you want to use something different. Or just break out the indiviual paragraphs or lines to work the way you want. An easy way is to select the background the chose "selections" then "invert" to copy out the text to a transparent backgound.

I've done this several times in scanned documents that ORC didn't pick up.

I have done fliers using psp as a publishing base. I belive it's 89pixels to one inch as a guide. Manipulating all the texts, banners,backgrounds and images is fairly easy using layers. You can then chose the same background color as the regular brochure, for integration. Also if you fade the edges of your images when you print it will show the background of the paper through, makes a quite interesting effect. printing out of psp using a trasparent background is also a very good way to integrate the text & images over the brochure.

JD

[Ruvy]

Sorry about the link here is is again http://logicsoft.netvision.net.il/

If this is the case you need to download langage modules from windows that include bidrectional and set it up.

Additionally, when I need to use Hebrew in Adobe Photoshop I have to get a localized version. Having all the right MS language features I cant get transfer text that will look right. For short phrases I do all sort of things - copy few words and past them as image, sometime I will right them in reverse etc. always a problem...