Follow-Ups to Answer from Expert Amy

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Cornelius wrote at 2006-09-06 19:00:44
I've been dealing with the Middle Eastern fonts issue with Illustrator for some time. What I'vew been doing is using TextEdit (on a Mac) to type the Arabic lettering then saving it as a pdf in the print dialogue. I then open the pdf file in Photoshop in high res and create bitmapped tif files to place into Illustrator. It's laborious, but the results look and print fantastic.

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soundavman wrote at 2009-02-10 16:57:56
This had me sweating too.

1. Write your Arabic text in your favourite text editing program.

2. Convert it to a PDF.

3. Use Illustrator to File > Open.

Your fonts are now magically in vector format.

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Ahmed Samy wrote at 2009-03-30 12:04:06
Write whatever text you want in word, use a font that has no restrictions, convert to pdf (Traditional & Simple Arabic don’t convert to pdf), open illustrator and select a new page, drag the pdf file from where ever it is into the new empty page, the text should appear perfect but you can’t edit, if you embed the text, you might get some rubbish (also if you open the pdf directly into illustrator it goes bad, so you have to drag it into an existing new page), so the best option is to go to Menu: Object, and select Flatten Transparency, in Raster/Vector Balance select 100% vector, and check the boxes where it says convert all text and strokes to outlines.



From there you will have to treat the text as an image, so you need to do all the editing in word first.



It works on CS3 and of course on CS4.

Unfortunately I haven’t got a mac, and I’m doing this on windows xp

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