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).
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Illustrator has the same problem as Photoshop with my fonts.
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.
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.]
I meant in the Illustrator itself:
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.
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!
(Initially, I thought: what, they are just check boxes, why not turn on both of them? But nooooo.)
You'd think it would be easier to maintain if they just merged the vanilla version and the ME versions into a single application.
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
@ 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 .