Arabic

Well - as is always the way will all things 'computer' - it wasn't quite so simple.

Letters differ slightly when they are at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of words, so the variety of these versions was available in the 'Symbols' menu within 'Word'.

Our Egyptian colleague created the text using all these variations in Word 2003 under Vista. Fine. Great. Perfect. Looked fantastic.

The problems began when I took it home on the memory stick and stuck it into an old - let's be clear about this: antedeluvian - version of Word. The fonts didn't come across. Rubbish came across. Trying to intersperse the odd English formatting for ISBNs threw everything out of kilter................ it got worse.

Try Coreldraw. Rubbish font. Try Photoshop - brilliant. Minor problem, the letters were in the wrong order, in fact in reverse order, sdrawkcab. Clever. Don't know how it did it. Making a pdf from Word had the same effect. Using Parnian and pasting text in - still backwards.

Lots of wasted time, head scratching, brain storming. In the end we remembered that our son had a laptop lent from school which ran Word 2007 under Vista. This preserved the formatting and although we had missed the deadline for getting the leaflet printed, at least we could run copies off from the resident printer.

Moral: don't get involved with the left to right alphabets. by comparison Greek and Cyrillic are a doddle.

So why did we get involved and cause ourselves all this grief? The result of going against our golden rules of dealing direct, feeling out of our depth with Arabic, and using an agency. I'll bore you with that story in another post.

Tonight, we're celebrating success with the Arabic flyer!

Keyboard Layout for other languages

Did you know that it is easy to install and use keyboard layouts for other languages?

I'm still in Windows XP ................ you just need to enable another language from the
Settings > Control Panel > Regional Language and Settings.
You need a 'hard' restart to enable the languages. Then a toggle appears on your task bar so you can flip between English/French/Russian/Whatever.

You can even install the right to left languages like Arabic .......... and away you go.

More info from Microsoft.

Google images has pictures of keyboard layouts if you don't want to go across the keyboard and print it out for yourself. Overlays are also available to buy, or even other language keyboards.

Good luck!

Arabic

So now we have a sentence about ourselves in Arabic. I hope our visitors at the exhibition in Dubai won't assume either that I speak Arabic, or that we publish an Arabic version of our book..... Much as I'd love to. (Both).

Leaflet in Arabic, and PDF Security

I know it's the weekend.

Saturday last week Catherine and I took display tables at the ISMLA Conference in Cheltenham. Fun, but long drive. Back after 11pm.

Saturday this week (yesterday) was spent doing the VAT. Horrible job, but when it is done, there is such a saintly feeling of piety, followed by relief and relaxation........... and it makes the end of year accounts sooooo... much easier.

While all this is going on, there is the GESS exhibition in Dubai to plan for. We received the log in codes for the exhibition website at close of work on Friday, and the deadlines for the exhibtion catalogue and some of the other usual info were this weekend. Of course the 'weekend' in Dubai is different from here, and a a deadline of midnight is not our midnight - as Dubai is ahead of us. With the help of Kate at The Publishers Association we made it .......... just.

Now we just need to get some translation and printing organised for an Arabic version of our leaflet.

We (Holly and I) have put a lot of work into activities to accompany our book, and the thought of a printed version x 6 of activites for all the languages is daunting. So downloadable, photocopiable .pdfs for printing and even a .pdf of the whole book of illustrations for whiteboard/computer screen seems to be the way forward.

Then teachers can print out just what is needed for today.

Piracy is such a universal problem in publishing that we are experimenting with a protection system called PDFLocker which we hope will enable us to give you - as requested last weekend - the right to print various of our useful publications including the transcripts* of our audiobooks. The example was for a group of six young students of Russian. Or this would give you rights to photocopy an activity for your children or your class.

We want to make your lives easier, so if there is anything you need - ask. You may be surprised at how receptive and helpful we can be.

* Transcripts are not word for word into each language. Our translators were asked to make the story flow correctly in their own language.