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djkencloud
Participant
February 16, 2009
Answered

Arabic Font Problem

  • February 16, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 1400 views
Hello,

I've been told by my client that my arab text is not rendering correctly. The problem occurs where an incorrect 'alef' appears next to a 'lam'. Now I'm not an arab speaker or reader unfortunately, so I really don't understand exactly what this means, but its incorrect. I've had a good look at my character settings, and I'm not seeing any extra properties that I can set to correct this. An extract of my code is below that relates to character format.

charFormat.color = fontColorIs;
charFormat.fontFamily = fontIs;
charFormat.fontSize = fontSizeIs;
charFormat.locale = "ar";
charFormat.ligatureLevel = LigatureLevel.EXOTIC;
charFormat.lineHeight = "160%";
charFormat.fontLookup = FontLookup.EMBEDDED_CFF;
charFormat.kerning = Kerning.ON;
paraFormat.textAlign = TextAlign.RIGHT;
paraFormat.direction = "rtl";

I've also put a some screen shots of the problem and the font online at http://www.kenmacleod.com.au/adobe - these 2 images were from the client and explain the issue.

Adobe Arabic is working and rendering correctly, so I'm presuming that it is a font issue, and the font I'm trying to make work, just can't work with Flash even though its an OTF.
I am wondering if maybe I've missed something. It doesn't appear to be a embedding issue either as I'm embedding the entire font via Gumbo.

If anyone has had luck with other Arabic fonts rendering correctly please let me know what they are.

Thanks, Ken.
This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer djkencloud
Just as a follow up to this problem if anyone else is experiencing something similar. We ended up contacting the actual developers of the Arabic font ( http://www.grapheast.com). They described it as a Unicode issue and said they would have to update their font, which they promptly did in about an hour and fortunately for us, it worked straight up. http://www.brashbrands.com/ar/

We had some unexpected issues with the Chinese version of the site too, I didn't do any research on font file sizes, but with the chinese language having so many characters, the font files seemed to vary from about 7MB to 15MB. Once squashed into a swf via Gumbo, the smallest versions were around the 4MB mark, but these were dropping characters all over the place. The 15MB looked great, but only came down to about 10MB, which is obviously way to big to embed. We tried just using 'sans' but some system fonts were dropping characters also, especially when we needed chinese characters next to punctuation. The result ended up being using a program called Fondu and extracting the mac system font Hei.dfont. The font size of the Gumbo swf ended up as 3MB and it worked perfectly. Details of the how to with Fondu are http://aralbalkan.com/1897 (thanks Aral Balkan and Fondu). http://www.brashbrands.com/zh/

2 replies

D
djkencloudAuthorCorrect answer
Participant
March 1, 2009
Just as a follow up to this problem if anyone else is experiencing something similar. We ended up contacting the actual developers of the Arabic font ( http://www.grapheast.com). They described it as a Unicode issue and said they would have to update their font, which they promptly did in about an hour and fortunately for us, it worked straight up. http://www.brashbrands.com/ar/

We had some unexpected issues with the Chinese version of the site too, I didn't do any research on font file sizes, but with the chinese language having so many characters, the font files seemed to vary from about 7MB to 15MB. Once squashed into a swf via Gumbo, the smallest versions were around the 4MB mark, but these were dropping characters all over the place. The 15MB looked great, but only came down to about 10MB, which is obviously way to big to embed. We tried just using 'sans' but some system fonts were dropping characters also, especially when we needed chinese characters next to punctuation. The result ended up being using a program called Fondu and extracting the mac system font Hei.dfont. The font size of the Gumbo swf ended up as 3MB and it worked perfectly. Details of the how to with Fondu are http://aralbalkan.com/1897 (thanks Aral Balkan and Fondu). http://www.brashbrands.com/zh/
R
Adobe Employee
robin_briggs
Adobe Employee
February 18, 2009
Not sure what is causing this problem. Is the font in question a Windows XP font? If so, have you tried it with the equivalent Windows Vista font? In any case, if its a commonly used font, then let us know what it is and we could try to reproduce the problem here.

Thanks!
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