Wednesday
Nov282007
A technical question
Issandr El AmraniI have recently been using a combination of del.icio.us and a Wordpress plugin called Postalicious to generate a daily list of my bookmarked links. As many of you may have noticed (unless you have more intelligent browsers than mine), Arabic script comes out as gibberish. If anyone knows a solution to this, I'd love to hear it.
Reader Comments (9)
I'm using Safari (on a Mac) and the Arabic script comes out just fine! If you are using Internet Explorer, I think there is a thing in the menu where you can choose Arabic script - a long list of languages comes up. Alternatively, just get Safari!!
Sasa.
Use a Mac. Font recognition is based on Unicode and has no problems with Arabic script.
Actually I do use a Mac, using Safari most of the time. In my experience Windows renders the fonts terribly, at least pre-Vista.
In the last automatic link dump I manually changed the top item to display Arabic properly, but look at older link dumps and you'll see the problem in Safari. I have told the plugin to use UTF-8. You can see the problem better here:
http://arabist.net/archives/2007/11/22/delicious-links-for-november-21st/
It's working fine in Firefox.
I have a Mac and use Firefox and saw it as gibberish. My character encoding is set to Unicode. I didn't mind because I can't read Arabic anyway. I don't know how to fix it but I can tell you this:
* when I changed my character-encoding on this end, even to Arabic, it still didn't work
* when I load the page in Safari, it still doesn't work
* when I go to Google News' Arabic edition, however, the text comes out fine, so my machine does handle Arabic text and display it properly
Sorry couldn't be more help.
Is the page being stored in the database ? If so then probably Arabic is converted by MySQL to latin1 from unicode (UTF8) and inserted in the HTML as latin1.
I don't really know how to solve that without database changes. Never used wp before.
I'm not even sure that is the problem.
I viewed the post in Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X with UTF-8 encoding, and it looks like gibberish. I would also suggest that the problem is with the plugin, as I can view Arabic text just fine when I follow the link.
Forgot to add, I would probably email the plugin developer for advice.
Thank you very much for all the input, guys! Will get in touch with the developer.