Arabic variable fonts in Photoshop

Georg Seifert

A user on my forum has problems with getting a Arabic variable font to work in Photoshop. I tried in and had the same result. Has anyone an Arabic font that works in Photoshop. 

(Illustrator CC 2018 doesn't seem to support Arabic layout at all. At least I couldn't find the World-Ready composer in my version).

Shahab Siavash

I think you already did this, but to type Arabic/Persian correctly in AI CC 18 you should go to "Edit/Preferences/Type/Language Options and enable Show Indic Options.

Georg Seifert

I didn’t do this. All help documents from Adobe didn’t mentioned it. I only found docs for CC 17 and those didn’t mention the setting. Thanks. 

Shahab Siavash

Georg Seifert said:

I didn’t do this. All help documents from Adobe didn’t mentioned it. I only found docs for CC 17 and those didn’t mention the setting. Thanks. 

You're welcome. It is very strange indeed. They used to call that "Middle Eastern". Have no idea why they changed it to "Indic".

Georg Seifert

Interestingly, you need to choose between Indic and CJK controls. 

Illustrator has the same problem as Photoshop with my fonts.

John Hudson

Interestingly, you need to choose between Indic and CJK controls. 

If it works the way it used to with CS and earlier CC, the features are additive. So if you select ME/Indic you get those features installed, but then if you change to CJK you get those too, and then you can switch back to English and retain all.

Shahab Siavash

Georg Seifert said:

Interestingly, you need to choose between Indic and CJK controls. 

Illustrator has the same problem as Photoshop with my fonts.

Yes, it has been like this for a few years now. I think it was after CS which basically had Middle Eastern versions (with a ME suffix), in CC it is a radio button and you have to select one. Every time needs restarting the programs too.

Shahab Siavash

John Hudson said:

Interestingly, you need to choose between Indic and CJK controls. 

If it works the way it used to with CS and earlier CC, the features are additive. So if you select ME/Indic you get those features installed, but then if you change to CJK you get those too, and then you can switch back to English and retain all.

If I'm not mistaken it changed after CS and now it is a radio button for each. (Actually it is a checkbox, but one of them could be selected at once!)

John Hudson

I'm not sure where you're referring to in the settings. I'm talking about the app language version preference setting in the Creative Cloud management tool:


Selecting the English/Arabic app language is how I've ensured that I get app versions with RTL layout control and Arabic script handling. [Note: I almost never use Illustrator, and seldom use Photoshop, so my experience is mostly based on InDesign.]

Shahab Siavash

John Hudson said:

I'm not sure where you're referring to in the settings. I'm talking about the app language version preference setting in the Creative Cloud management tool:

Selecting the English/Arabic app language is how I've ensured that I get app versions with RTL layout control and Arabic script handling. [Note: I almost never use Illustrator, and seldom use Photoshop, so my experience is mostly based on InDesign.]

Thanks. I have never seen this before. Because Adobe Creative Cloud (the whole Adobe ID) is blocked for Iran. (Behance too!) It is very critical to the world peace apparently!

I meant in the Illustrator itself:

John Hudson

Interesting. I've not seen that before, but as I say, I'm not much of an Illustrator user.

There's a mindset I've encountered among some engineers at Adobe that text always consists of a single language or script, and hence that no one ever needs to access layout options for multiple writing systems together. I most recently encountered this in reference to a bug I logged against InDesign CS5, and which is still not fixed: last I queried this, the response was that because the bug affected Latin script text, it didn't need to be fixed in the World Ready Composer, since the affected text could be set using the regular paragraph composer (leaving aside that a similar bug with slightly different results affected that composer too). It hadn't crossed their minds that a paragraph might contain, e.g. both Latin and Devanagari words.

Shahab Siavash

John Hudson said:

There's a mindset I've encountered among some engineers at Adobe that text always consists of a single language or script, and hence that no one ever needs to access layout options for multiple writing systems together.

That is a rather odd way of thinking I guess. 

And here in AI for example I think no one can type a paragraph with Persian and Japanese or Arabic & Chinese. I have never tried CJK, but still it could be the case and for that people need to do what? Type Persian, save, go to edit, change to East Asia, exit the AI, re-run, open the file, and then type the Japanese text? And every edit would need this? I don't know. Maybe it is not that big a deal, But annoying for sure!

John Hudson

And then there's Siddham script, which is both Indic and East Asian.

James Puckett

John Hudson said:

It hadn't crossed their minds that a paragraph might contain, e.g. both Latin and Devanagari words.

Shahab Siavash

John Hudson said:

And then there's Siddham script, which is both Indic and East Asian.

What a concept! I didn't know about this script.

James Puckett

This is a test post because someone else cannot post in this thread.

Thomas Phinney

extra special: the two language options in Illustrator are displayed as check boxes, but behave as radio buttons.

(Initially, I thought: what, they are just check boxes, why not turn on both of them? But nooooo.)

André G. Isaak

On the topic of InDesign, I still don't grasp why I must set my language to Arabic when downloading the application if I want RTL options, which then gives me a help menu which directs me to webpages in Arabic.

You'd think it would be easier to maintain if they just merged the vanilla version and the ME versions into a single application.

DavidMohr

Howdy Georg,

I can't speak to Illustrator and InDesign, but Photoshop integrated the MENA engine into all versions of the application for nearly a decade now.  The MENA engine actually DOES handle Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts as well, though it does not support some of the more esoteric language-specific features.  Further, when you specify a composer, it applies immediately to all newly-created documents and, in addition, you can (immediately) switch composers for a given paragraph via a menu entry in the Paragraph panel.

Now, as for support of variable fonts which include Arabic...  At the time that feature was added, there were no such fonts.  Now there are and some fonts work fine (Markazi on Mac) while others do not (Noto Sans Arabic on either Win or Mac).  We are currently looking into the problem and are hoping for a fix soon.  If you have other variable fonts which contain these glyphs, please feel free to ping me so I can make sure that they get tested.

Thanks,
David

AzizMostafa AzizAli

> Now, as for support of variable fonts which include Arabic...  At the time that feature was added, there were no such fonts... If you have other variable fonts which contain these glyphs, please feel free to ping me so I can make sure that they get tested.

@ Ever seen the dynamic and unique Arabic fonts of QalamBartar? They do support both Windows and Mac and go with All Adobe and Microsoft applications that support Arabic and Arabic-based scripts. To see how QalamBartar works, please go explore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itZ66gUVVCI .