Flash sites in arabic with dynamic content? any such thing?

[McMurphy]

Hi ppl,

I'm currently conducting a small research into the use of RTL (right to left) languages in dynamic Flash content. I'm looking fo exmaples of Flash sites in arabic and new media design companies in the Middle East who provide Flash services.

Thanks in advance for any reference,

Cheers,

McMurphy

[tackaberry]

I don't know any but flash mx supports unicode so you can create dynamic content in any language.

[McMurphy]

That's true but only to some extent. You cannot embed the fonts of the dynamic RTL text you are loading. The direction and/or order of the characters changes and the text is not readable. Being limited to use device fonts is not an acceptable solution in every case. That's why I'm interested to know how arabic Flash sites using dynamic content are resolving the issue (if they even try)

McMurphy

[Tw4win]

Hi all,

I'm an web engineer for a language translation company so I deal with this sort of thing everyday.

The simple answer to your question is "Yes, Flash will support bi-directional languages." However, you'll probably have to jump through a few hoops in order to get things to work correctly.

The easiest way of doing this is to make all of the textboxes in your site dynamic. Then link the textboxes to individual text files. The Arabic should display properly. (Look for a tutorial involving Japanese in the tutorials section - it will give you the general idea of what you need to do)

One word of caution. Windows doesn't like Arabic so I would suggest working on a localized (Arabic) OS.

[McMurphy]

"However, you'll probably have to jump through a few hoops in order to get things to work correctly."

Why should I? don't you think that Macromedia should provide a quality product which does not discriminate a part of the world's population (and a great part at that). All those hoops cost money which clients are NOT that willing to spend now days. I would expect Macromedia to provide solution and show what the Web can be in all languages and not only those which it managed to find solution for. It's not only an accessibility issue (which Macromedia fail again and again) but also common business sense. I would imagine a great deal of projects which should be authored in Flash are developed using HTML simply because using dynamic content with Flash is too much of a pain when it comes to RTL.

McMurphy

[Tw4win]

I agree with you 100%. However, in this case it really isn't Macromedia's fault. It's really no one' fault. Some languages (especially those that are more "graphic" such as Arabic, Chinese, etc...) are harder to use in a digital (eg. computer) environment. Microsoft and other OS makers have done a good job implementing Asian languages in their products but are still struggling with Arabic/Hebrew/etc... because of their bi-directional nature in adition to the fact that they are double-byte languages.

If you want more information on these issues you might want to check out Unicode resources.

[McMurphy]

Well... I agree there's no magic solution at the moment but my experiences of using Hebrew with Microsoft products has been MUCH more positive than the ones I'm having using Hebrew with Flash. Perhaps I'm lacking some technical insights into the matter but since we're talking about the direction of the language I don't see how the font's appearance has anything to do with it. The characters are displayed fine visualy but not as a whole. Even if you use device fonts and type a punctuation of some sort it will appear the beginning of the sentence.

This is just poor quality, plain and simple. We tend to think of Macromedia as a "cool" company and this is why we often tend to let it get a way with a lot of issues like not notifying the Flash player had a serious security problems in a clear and noticable mannor because its bad PR. Well, this also bad PR. Its also poor accessibility and makes the moto "What the Web can be" seems a bit silly when you realize it should be something more like "What the Web can be in non RTL languages". Sorry for the rant ppl but after 4 years of dealing with this I guess I've just had enough. And I belive in Flash and the message it carries I would like to see this matter resolved in some way and not simply turn to HTML just because of language considerations.

McMurphy

[big_k]

well mcmurphey, its like you said, the more time you spend, the more money it costs.
i'm sure macromedia has looked into this and thought about wether they should spend extra time to make rtl easier to use, and figured that the extra profit they would gain from it wouldnt compensate for the man hours it would take to develop it.

[McMurphy]

Yeah. It's not about the Web and it's not about the Flash. It's all about the money and it's far from being some revelation but Macromedia are going out of there way to market Flash as a cross platform-multi lingual technology when in fact it is not so. There is a big demand in Isreal for developing Flash apps and Flash sites (at least that's my impression from my "local" community experience) but the reality is that the product isn't good enough to allow people to use it. I guess the answer is that those people aren't worth the effort of developing a better more accessible product but who am I to argue with a big corp like Macromedia.

Me and a few mates contacted the Macromedia Flash dev team to see if anything can be done, although I have a feeling that once it gets down to "OK, how many hours will it take us to fix this?" they will burry it. I'm using the word fix and not add for example because at the moment the product is borken and people (not all of them I know) simply can't use it properly. Well.. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.