Another Arabic sentence:
أَنَا لَمْ أَدُخّنْ إِذْ أُمّى مَنَعَتْ هَذَا.
I never smoked because my mother forbade it.
After trying some RIGHT TO LEFT EMBEDDING and LEFT TO RIGHT EMBEDDING to get the full-stop at the end of the arabic sentence correct, I decided to try a CSS based method and ignore how it looks while editing the text itself. A single ’<’ on a line indicates that the following non-empty lines are to be shown in a div using right-to-left direction.
I also noticed that it seems impossible to get the Kassrah ( ِ ) below Shaddah ( ّ ) when vocalizing words such as أمي (my mother).
I also need to enlarge arabic fonts separately from the rest of the page. While I type, I now use point size 48 or some such in order to read the arabic text. 😄
Another quirk on Firefox 1.0.3 for Max OSX 10.3 (Panther) is that Firefox doesn’t always tell Mac OSX that it can accept Arabic input. Thus, sometimes the Arabic input method is disabled in the menu, and at other times it is not. Very mysterious. And totally wasting my time. There is a lot of usability work that needs to into a decent Arabic editor. The Firefox textarea needs help.
Which brings me back to Emacs... I really hope that Emacs will get this correct eventually.