The Arabic Writer

• Download Arabic Writer - 17.1 KB
• Download source code - 40.5 KB

Introduction

The Arabic Writer is a program designed to help Arab designers to work with programs that don't support Arabic language characters, such as Adobe Photoshop.

it was written as a participation in a contest hosted and sponsored by The Arabic Team for Programming to write a Free GPL program that enables Arab designers to use Arabic text in programs that didn't support the Arabic language, such as Photoshop and other programs.

It converts Arabic characters to its equivalent Unicode characters, and then the user can copy the generated text and use it in any program that supports Unicode.

How does it work?

While some programs don't support Arabic characters, almost all programs support Unicode, which is a universal charset that includes almost every character of every language.

But, as in most western languages, it is left-to-right oriented. That's why when you try to type Arabic letters in Photoshop, it appears like you are writing backwards.

so, all we need is a program that re-arranges the Arabic letters in a way that shows the characters as whole sentences. That's exactly what the Arabic Writer does.

Advantages?

• It is free, and available for everyone to use or edit if needed.
• It doesn't need a pack of special fonts (as in some programs), because most of the Operating Systems out there have fonts that support Unicode, like the Arial font for example.
• It supports English letters, symbols, parenthesis, Arabic and English numbers, the use of multiple lines, and it can convert back the generated text if it was processed again in the same manner.
• It is very easy to edit the program by editing the HTML file, no need to recompile the code.
• It has an on-screen Arabic keyboard to support systems that don't support the Arabic language at all.
• It is portable, and can be run either from the exe file (requires Windows + .NET Framework 2 or higher), or by simply running the HTML file in any browser. This way, the program can be used in any Operating System (cross-platform).
• It is very small in size (about 68 KB unpacked).

Using the Arabic Writer

The program is pretty straightforward; there is an input panel and an output panel; you write your Arabic text in the input panel, press Process Text, then copy the generated text from the output panel to your program of choice.

The program was written with VB.NET 2005, and HTML + JavaScript.