Arabic on the Macintosh

The Golden age of printing for Islamicists surely was the 19th century, when skilled European and occasionally Middle Eastern and Indian typesetters, could compose in as many fonts as an author could write. One reads Goldziher’s Die Zāhiriten with envy, not only for the meticulous transliterated Arabic and generous footnotes at the bottom of the page, but for the extensive Arabic quotations inserted into the text and notes. Since few of the Arabic texts he cited had been published, Goldziher provided his readers with his evidence in the original. Those were the days; and a new golden age for Islamicists may be upon us. With computers, not only footnotes on the page but transliteration and multiscript publishing are suddenly feasible and even simple. The items discussed below take advantage of the flexibility of the Macintosh system to let even casual computer users produce Arabic. These programs make it possible for anyone easily to produce text in Islamic script (Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Urdu, etc.) in camera-ready form

Arabic · Arabic script · Art · Casual · Flexibility (engineering · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Persian · Publishing · Transliteration · Urdu · World Wide Web · Artificial Intelligence · Classics · Computer Science · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Law · Mathematics · Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing · Philosophy