Thomas Milo designed several incredibly complicated fonts-including a Naskh that BYU used for several years-that were created to take full advantage of Tasmeem's powers. InDesign ME was expensive and had a dumb licensing system that didn't work well.Īdditionally, BYU used a special plugin for InDesign ME called Tasmeem, which provided a complicated (and very nice!) typesetting engine for Arabic text ( Saudi Aramco's magazine even had a cover story dedicated to it in 2007). Winsoft, a third-party vendor, created a licensed version of InDesign called InDesign ME, and released it in parallel with Creative Suite CS1–CS5.5. In the dark ages of Arabic typesetting, InDesign did not support right-to-left (RTL) languages. Regardless, authors and editors today use Mellel, Pages, LibreOffice, and Word for Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts, so you need to have access to all these programs. But it's the de facto industry standard, and InDesign was designed with. (Not that Word is that great-it's typically quite horrible. In 2016 (!!!) Microsoft finally added RTL support to Word 2015 on OS X, so now it is possible to just stick with Word all the time. In 2010, METI started using LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) for many of its Arabic documents, since it has RTL support and has better support for styles (it also uses a standard document format. In the early years of METI, manuscripts were typed and edited in both Nisus and Mellel programs until Apple added RTL support to Pages, which has decent support for exporting documents (with styles!) to. Though both programs support character and paragraph styles, those styles are lost and converted to local formatting when exporting as RTF, so no styles are carried over when documents are placed in InDesign. Third-party developers created specialized word processors like Nisus Writer and Mellel to solve this, but neither program used (or still uses) standard file formats, so documents written in Nisus or Mellel are typically locked into those formats unless exported as RTF or something else. In the dark ages of OS X, there was no Apple- or Microsoft-created program to type Arabic text.
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