The Underscore Archives

Miles,

The biggest problems I've had when writing Arabic pages is with
cutting and pasting.

Most IDE's will spot that you are writing in Arabic when you paste and
switch their view to right-to-left, meaning when you attempt to write
a close tag, it appears at the start. Very confusing, even more so
when you go back to writing let-to-right. Give a couple a try before
you make a start. I found Eclipse or MS Visual Developer Express to be
pretty good.

You'll also find that you need a much bigger standard font size for
Arabic script than normal.

Many content management systems (Zope for example) will convert all
your copy to html entities on submit, making it very difficult to make
later changes (get ready to do lots of counting of characters)

Dont forget to set your document language to Arabic (ar) (why do so
many people leave pages as en-US?)

Lastly, and most obviously, if you can't read Arabic, it's a real pain
checking everything reads correctly. Be prepared for long approval
waits.

Hope this helps,

Jon Hadley
http://jon-hadley.com