A technical question

I 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.

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9 Responses to “A technical question”

  1. 1 Sasa

    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.

  2. 2 Johanna

    Use a Mac. Font recognition is based on Unicode and has no problems with Arabic script.

  3. 3 arabist

    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/

  4. 4 Brian Ulrich

    It’s working fine in Firefox.

  5. 5 dan

    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.

  6. 6 Mohammed Sameer

    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.

  7. 7 Mohammed

    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.

  8. 8 Mohammed

    Forgot to add, I would probably email the plugin developer for advice.

  9. 9 arabist

    Thank you very much for all the input, guys! Will get in touch with the developer.



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