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!