Recently we had to do some work in Arabic for a client of ours. We had never used Arabic in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator before. So when the client asked “you can do Arabic” the response was “oh yeah of course” without giving it a second thought. Windows supports Arabic, so in turn Adobe will right?
Wrong.
Adobe does not support Right to left languages like Hebrew or Arabic. Instead you must purchase the separate “Middle Eastern” version of Creative Suite, Photoshop or Illustrator. There are also a couple plugins available that we found that claim to enable Right to Left typefaces in Photoshop. When we actually found them, it turns out that most are for Mac, or just dont’ work past Photoshop 7. We use CS3, so we were out of luck.
So, after much searching, trying, etc. What did we end up doing? What we should have done in the first place.
We downloaded The Gimp for Windows, created a new artwork, typed our arabic text in, and used a proper Arabic font. Then we saved the item as a 600 DPI psd file and imported it into photoshop. It’s not editable like real text, but, it’s good enough for us.
Might save someone else some hours of frustration. Good luck.
Comments
Comment by Gimp Ebooks on 2009-09-19 15:14:05 -0500
Thanks for this valuable post. I love gimp.