# colouring letters in Arabic script



## Sidjanga

Hi all,

Maybe there's been a thread here on this before, and maybe other languages are affected too; I haven't been able to find anything relevant to my question, though.

I've noticed that there's been some change regarding the use of colours to highlight Arabic letters.

Previously (until a few months ago) you were able to colour/highlight single Arabic letters within a word without affecting that letters' or the neighbouring letters' shape  (Arabic letters take different shapes depending on their position in the word).
For example, you were able to write the word *قبل* ("before/ago", among other meanings) and highlight the central letter ب using some colour, while the word form remained unaffected.

Now the result looks like this: *قبل *i.e. the continuity of the word is interrupted on both sides of the coloured letter, and all three letters assume their "basic shape", i.e. the one they have when they stand alone or are not connected to their neighbouring letters for some other reasons.

What is that change due to? The update?

Do you think there's a remedy to this?

Thanks


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## clevermizo

Actually that doesn't happen on my screen at all. Maybe you should check the encoding your browser is set to?


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## panjabigator

قبل

Hmmm, I'm having the same problem.  Could you suggest how to correct my browser's encoding?


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## elroy

I think it has to do with the browser you're using.  If you're using Firefox it looks fine, but if you're using Internet Explorer it doesn't.  I don't know about other browsers.  And I don't think it has to do with encoding.


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## Masjeen

clevermizo said:


> Actually that doesn't happen on my screen at all. Maybe you should check the encoding your browser is set to?


 
me too, it doesn't happen on my screen..


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## cherine

I'm using IE now and it looks fine. Maybe it's something in the encoding not in the kind of browser used.
The encoding set in my browser is Unicode (UTF-8).


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## Frank06

Same here, with IE8, FF3.6, no problem (UTF-8). 
Google Chrome (also UTF-8) doesn't render the coloured Arabic script as intended!


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## Sidjanga

Thanks for your replies.





elroy said:


> I think it has to do with the browser you're using.  If you're using Firefox it looks fine, but if you're using Internet Explorer it doesn't.  I don't know about other browsers.  And I don't think it has to do with encoding.


Well, I _am _using Firefox now, for example, but I've also used IE quite a lot here, and it has been like that for months now, from whichever computer or with whichever browser I wrote or read stuff on the forum.

Can the encoding "change itself"? 
I certainly didn't implement any changes on my laptop (back home), and it had worked fine ever before.
Also, I find it hard to imagine that all the computers I've used in these past weeks have exactly the same encoding (but who knows, maybe they do..)

Well, in any case, there are certainly worse things in life.


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## clevermizo

Sidjanga said:


> Can the encoding "change itself"?



No, the encoding is a standard. If a browser is using UTF-8, then it's referring to the Unicode standard.



> I certainly didn't implement any changes on my laptop (back home), and it had worked fine ever before.


You could try uninstalling and reinstalling the browser.



> Also, I find it hard to imagine that all the computers I've used in these past weeks have exactly the same encoding (but who knows, maybe they do..)


Actually, they probably do. The default character coding for any page is defined by the _web page_ not by your browser. For example, here's the header from the WR sourcecode on the forum page:



> <head>
> <!-- no cache headers -->
> <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
> <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="-1" />
> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />
> <!-- end no cache headers -->
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; *charset=UTF-8"* />


 Obviously if a computer doesn't actually support Unicode, then the UTF-8 encoding set by wordreference.com will be meaningless. If you experience this at Internet cafés or otherwise not on your laptop, you can go to View>(Character)Encoding (either in IE or Firefox) on the menu bar and see if it is something other than UTF-8. If it is set to something else, you may experience problems. You can try to change it to UTF-8, but again, Unicode support may not be installed (hard to believe these days, but possible).

There are also some PC vs. Mac differences worthy of note. For some bizarre reason on my old Macintosh, in Microsoft Word, Arabic letters would never connect to one another (but that has to do with MS Office and not with Unicode support. It's because MS stopped supported Mac Office and never included the necessary language packs with it). If it is a browser issue, then again my recommendation is to uninstall and re-install the browser.


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## Sidjanga

Thanks, Mizo.

The encoding _is _set to UTF-8 on this computer, but it's the same problem here.
I'm afraid I won't be able to reinstall the browser here, but I'll try that back home.


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## mkellogg

Strange.  I changed the encoding of the pages to UTF-8 a couple of months ago.  That is probably when the problem started since this affected the way the Arabic letters are encoded.

I suggest upgrading to the latest version of the browsers where you can.  That might fix the problem.

I see the problem in Safari (4.0.5) and Chrome, but not FF or IE8 (all on Windows here). 
 - The problem seems to be with the browsers.
 - I suggest reporting the bugs if you find that they haven't been reported yet.
 - I just searched a little.  The problem might be font related (but I don't think so).  You might want to test different fonts.

I hope this helps,
Mike


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