Forums: Flash:

we have here a biggish app that works in English only, some texts coming in from XML and others are just static text fields in the FLA.

And now we're being asked to convert it to Arabic. I've never worked with Arabic in Flash before.

I've been Googling and it's not looking so good.

Anyone here have any experience with it?

Can I make a static text field read right to left?

Can I make a dynamic text field read right to left?

arabicode.com/flaraby/flash_arabic_support.php

have you used it?

I've tinkered with it, but ended up passing 'cause we also needed Hebrew support... They don't support Hebrew (Hmmm... Wonder why?).

For Arabic, it does get the job done...

any suggestions on what I can use to edit XML files that contain Arabic texts? It seems it needs to be more than just Unicode aware, it also needs to be bi-directional.

ah, Visual Web Developer seems to do it ok.

Flaraby doesn't support Hebrew because Flaraby is converting true Unicode Arabic to an ASCII range and using 255 range fonts for display. Arabic has been converted to fit within the 255 range font system several times, and most of those fonts suck. A Hebrew converter would need a custom conversion table and an ASCII range font.

The conversion does mess with the Arabic. Look at the example, you can see, if you look character to character, that vowelized Unicode Arabic is being smashed into the Traditional Arabic font (which is a really inaccurate name for the font, considering what is happening to the text) and lacking entire characters. This is an often commonly accepted problem on unlocalized platforms, and users simply accept the errors. Arabic is an incredibly complex language, with specific vowel consonant constructs for specific word orders, inflections, and religious contexts. Converting true Unicode to a stunted format can often be disasterous, as happened with this Turkish conversion.. You're going to want an Arabic fluent tester on your team.

As I have said a bajillion times before, Macrodobe will claim they support all Unicode, and in fact they do. the problem is the textfield object does not support right to left handling. You can wrangle it to display it, but once a user tries to start doing things like scroll, or select, the field goes wacky, and forget about cross platform, or even legacy Win support. So it is moot. I hjave been posting this issue in Flash forums since Flash 5, and still nothing has been done. The textfield object in Flash still sucks and the 255 embed limit (while obviously logical in a web app dev environment) is just silly that Flash only lets you choose 0-255 rather than some alternate range of of say 512 that might start at 6500 and end at 6611 in some international Unicode font such as Arial, which has a robust Arabic range. The only way to display Arabic close to properly is to run the conversion to ASCII and manually handle the line breaks. It appears this product takes care of that for you.

The problem then is if a reader copy pastes the Arabic in your flash app to a Unicode application such as Microsoft Word Arabic, they will see gibberish. Flaraby provides convertArabicChar(p:Number, str:String):String for this purpose, but obviously that isn't so intuitiive as ctrl-C. o.0

man we're lucky to have grown up speaking such a relatively simple language such as English, at least in terms of its alphabet anyway.

Thanks for the reply Persist, I was hoping you were still lurking around here


Yes I've already pointed out that we'll need to work closely with an Arabic speaker, but I hadn't thought we'd also need one while we're doing some investigation to see if it's even possible to do this job.


I don't understand what the cross platform issues would be here?


Damn I need to get some work, but I wish this project hadn't come along...

Originally posted by: persistConverting true Unicode to a stunted format can often be disasterous, as happened with this Turkish conversion..

and blimey!

Not used it, but looked like a possible approach with some info and it would be possible to define limitations to the client in terms of the component so that expectations could be met on both sides, well if you can get it to be a multi-faith component!

persist... That is way more information than I ever wanted to know about anything that has to do with font, characters, vowelization and all things AssKey...

It makes me wonder what your day job is...

BUT, good information to pass on to a client that's beating our heads in to support Hebrew and Arabic... :thumbsoup:

Originally posted by: Hideaway
persist... That is way more information than I ever wanted to know about anything that has to do with font, characters, vowelization and all things AssKey...

It makes me wonder what your day job is...

BUT, good information to pass on to a client that's beating our heads in to support Hebrew and Arabic... :thumbsoup:

I wrote one of the first Arabic dynamic text display solutions for Flash 5 waaay back in the flash 5 days. It's the same idea as flaraby, except we did the unicode to ascii conversion on the server side since it is a little unfair, if simply bad architecture to make flash do it in the presentation layer. oh and we were running on mobile devices.

Originally posted by: persist
I wrote one of the first Arabic dynamic text display solutions for Flash 5 waaay back in the flash 5 days. It's the same idea as flaraby, except we did the unicode to ascii conversion on the server side since it is a little unfair, if simply bad architecture to make flash do it in the presentation layer. oh and we were running on mobile devices,

It's lucky for me then that Flaraby works the way it does, as this is an offline flash app for a CDROM.

Originally posted by: persist

I wrote one of the first Arabic dynamic text display solutions for Flash 5 waaay back in the flash 5 days.
...
oh and we were running on mobile devices.

Nerd

BUT, have you ever made pinball in Arabic?