The other format was made by Microsoft and the font maker Adobe. Virtually no-one outside Apple has made use of this format, advanced though it may be. Any font that uses the AAT system will work fine on any current Mac in all programs that do Arabic. One was made by Apple, they call it the AAT ('Apple Advanced Technology'). For that, it needs further instructions, and they come - you guessed it - in two varieties. In addition, the computer must be able to connect the characters into words. But being a Unicode font is not enough - that standard just identifies each character. As mentioned elsewhere, the Mac, Windows and Unix all today follow the 'Unicode' standard, while older fonts used different systems and cannot work. 'Old' includes both fonts made for the old Mac and for old versions of Windows. But it may be hard to find them and to distinguish OK fonts from those that do not work. There are very many such fonts out there, both for free and commercially, several hundred.

Windows and Unix fonts made in the OpenType format can be used by most programs on new Macs (since late 2007).

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of places we can find such, but those two are very useful.

Newer fonts made particularly for the Mac will work on all Macs and in all programs.

2000, will not work on any current Mac (unless they were made by Apple itself).

Old fonts, that is Arabic fonts made before ca.

To get some understanding of it, we have to set up some guidelines: It does not help that this issue is fairly complex, there are so many different formats for fonts, some do not work on the Mac at all some are OK for English characters, but not Arabic, and some work in some programs and not in others! And, to top it off, many more work on new Macs than the one you bought three years ago. They are often more keen to tell us how beautiful their fonts are, than whether we can use them or not. That goes not just for freeware sites, but also for commercial ones.

The websites are often rather vague on the subject, and not only because most of them are made for Windows and Unix users.

The bad is that it is not easy to figure out which ones you can actually use. The good news is that there are lots of good fonts on the Internet provided for free, and more available commercially. With Arabic up and running on your Mac and programs to work in, the next step is to see what kind of Arabic fonts you can put onto it.

Kurdish font for mac