Working with a FrameMaker book in Arabic

[sebdea]

Hello,

I received a FrameMaker book that will be translated from English to Arabic. This is new for me. I am working with RTL languages in InDesign, but never in FrameMaker. My knowledge of FrameMaker is not great. Most of the projects I worked on required simple formatting, cleaning nothing too complicated.

I noticed that FM has support for RTL languages. I noticed that I have an option to set the direction of a paragraph from LTR to RTL. Does it have an option for characters? As I read in a post on this forum, in order to fix ©Apple CarPlay to read Apple CarPlay© I need to insert RTL markers followed by LTR markers.  What are they? Where are they located? In InDesign, I simply select the Latin text and set it to read and write LTR.

How do I set the book and/or each chapter document to read from LTR to RTL? In InDesign, I press CTRL+SHIFT+P, select RTL reading order, and the document is set for RTL language. All columns, headers, and footers are set for RTL. Is there a way to do this in FrameMaker, too?

I noticed that tables can be set for RTL reading and writing order. So, that should be fine.

How about TOC? Should I set something in FrameMaker in order to generate the TOC for RTL? Will it do it without my intervention? Or will it be generated as LTR TOC, and I have to manually set the paragraphs for RTL reading and writing?

Any input will be highly appreciated.

Thank you.

Sebastian

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

I worked with Arabic only once. Little experience.

Please check the online help about Arabic. Here is a general explanation:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/using-framemaker/FrameMaker-2022/user-guide/frm_basics...

You can also search the online help for "Arabic". There are more hits in the online help.

Best regards, Winfried

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You can also search the FM forum for "Arabic" - there have been some posts involving fonts and diacriticals 

[Bob_Niland]

Before investing a lot of effort in implementing the Arabic version of the document in FM, assess what Arabic characters it requires.

If you only need characters from these Unicode blocks, FM can do that:
Arabic (U+0600–06FF, 256 characters)
Arabic Supplement (U+0750–077F, 48 characters)
Arabic Extended-B (U+0870–089F, 42 characters)
Arabic Extended-A (U+08A0–08FF, 96 characters)
Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50–FDFF, 631 characters)
Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70–FEFF, 141 characters)

If you need anything from these, FM cannot presently do it (FRMAKER-10976):
Rumi Numeral Symbols (U+10E60–10E7F, 31 characters)
Arabic Extended-C (U+10EC0-10EFF, 7 characters)
Indic Siyaq Numbers (U+1EC70–1ECBF, 68 characters)
Ottoman Siyaq Numbers (U+1ED00–1ED4F, 61 characters)
Arabic Mathematical Alphabetic Symbols (U+1EE00–1EEFF, 143 characters)
InDesign probably can handle them all.