Hilmi Al-Kindy

Does your software support Arabic text (letters flow together according to predefined rules)?

Thank you for clarifying, I apologize for my post if it has caused offense, I do understand that you are taking on a monumental task to create powerful software at an affordable price point. By the way, the fact that I have been using your products since 2008 tells you that I do have great respect for your products. As to the guy who was asking why there isn't an application developed specifically for the Arabic community, once he finds an answer to that question he could probably also figure out why we are all considered third world economies and he can fix all our economic problems. To answer his question would involve delving in economic theory, geopolitics and good old fashioned righteous ranting. I believe all these are outside the scope of this forum.

ADOBE and Microsoft fully support RTL, but Microsoft does not have a solid artwork or desktop publishing solution (publisher is basically abandonware now with no updates in ages) and Adobe's solution is expensive and subscription based which many people try to avoid. Apple has been supporting Arabic language with strong solid support since the 80s. In the 90's Quark was king of desktop publishing and it too had solid Arabic language support. So you are incorrect in assuming there are no Arabic language programs. The issue is specifically with Serif's failure to support this market.

Most likely the price point they have set for the software is too low to justify the hire of a programmer to add this functionality. Serif has always set their software on the value end of the pricing spectrum. I can't see any other explanation for why 12 years later they still can't support Arabic language. I don't know in real life how big the company is, but many companies that do business on the internet look like big companies but in reality are just a small team of 2 to 10 people sometimes working out of someones garage. Now I'm sure Serif is bigger than that, they have global distribution even back when products were sold in physical CD, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are big enough to hire 1 or 2 extra programmers. But if you look according to a quick internet search, Arabic is spoken by roughly 420 million people in the world. I am an Arab, I know for a fact that most of the market here is for cheaper value software and as soon as a solid alternative to Adobe products is introduced, a huge new market segment will be open to them immediately. These days you don't even need a regional company to help you market, you just flood google ads with marketing your product. That is a lot of software licenses waiting to be sold.

Don't hold your breath. I started talking to Serif about Arabic language support in 2008. They choose to ignore a market segment. This is just an opportunity for a competitor to pick up the slack and take over the entire market. They can't be bothered, they are not interested they have no plans to do it. so don't waste your time. I might be wrong, but my impression is, the company has taken a conscious decision not to support RTL languages but just don't want to tell clients flat out that they are not interested in supporting RTL. I can not speculate as to the reasons, but had they really wanted to support Arabic or Hebrew it would have been done by now.