Actinic in Arabic ??

[TBird1]

Our Saudi distributor has asked if we could produce a localised version of our UK web site which we built inhouse using Actinic Business v7.0.6.

I'm interested to see if this is possible so that we can sell them a managed service ie where we manage the shopping engine and web site and the saudi office manages stock, order fulfillment & logistics

Interested to know if this is likely to be possible or to hear from anyone who has been down this road already ?

Thanks,

John

ps
To clairify: The requirement then is primarily for the content within the Actinic site to be presented in Arabic (product descriptions, navigation links, email templates, shopping basket text etc) - the admin side could probably remain English.

[acompton]

I don't know about Actinic, or web sites in Arabic, but I do know about PC applications in Arabic.

They main concern is - do they want the text in English or Arabic.
If the latter, You are going to have to change all the messages in Actinic.

The right fonts must be installed, although assuming the customers
are in the Arab States, they will already have browsers with Arabic fonts.

As Arabic reads from right-to-left, there is a practice of working from right to left. Windows draws everything the other way around - menus start in the rop-right corner with'File'; 'Edit' is next-left etc. Desktop icons are on the right-hand side. Presumably, on a web page, menus will go down the right hand side and the Add-to-Cart button will be on the left.

You would have to determine how the Arabic browsers render HTML.
If its the same as ours, then the whole site design will need reversing.
If it automatically reverses the drawing position, then you'll probably need an Arabic browser to check it, or possibly even Arabic Windows (that's a wierd experience, I can tell you).

Finally, if the whole site is in Arabic, there is the problem of error messages - there are completely unintelligable when reported back to you. Even different product names will be hard to tell apart.

As you have a Saudi distributor, some of there problems may not exists

Alan

[TBird1]

I can see from some Arabic pages how reading/navigating from right to left will work, here's a good example of a familiar site in Arabic: http://arabic.cnn.com

From my little bit of Actinic experience built over the last few months I see there appears to be plenty of flexibility in the page and content layouts within the supplied templates (I'm using Smart Theme). Fonts and translations allowing, an Arabic version should not be too difficult (rhetorical question btw) !?

I guess I'm just looking for some 'comfort' from seeing/hearing of others experience in this area . . . ?

[acompton]

Ha! TBird1 say he want comfort. I ask: Why he open internet shop?

Seriously though, the CNN example shows that our western browsers are rendering right-to-left reading when showing an arabic (note the scroll bar down the LHS). The fonts are ok, althought when you click on a news article, the title bar is screwed up (presumably because I'm using Western Windows). Still gonna be a major template hack. Maybe V8 is a better environment for this.

Alan

[wjcampbe]

Actinic v8 is unfortunately not ready for porting to Arabic. I discussed this with Chris Barling recently, offering to make the port uising native Arabic programming resources.

Unfortunately Arabic, like Japanese and Korean, requires full Unicode support, and this is not going to be available before v9 (and possibly beyond).

[acompton]

Unfortunately Arabic, like Japanese and Korean, requires full Unicode support, and this is not going to be available before v9 (and possibly beyond).

In my 'real' job I work on large PC application. We have done ports to Arabic and Hebrew without Unicode. This was a myth that was around for a long time prior to the ports being done. The Arabic and Hebrew characters are available in the extended character set, provided the right code page is switched in. We do, however, use SQL Server, which is a unicode database; Access may not be.

Alan

[TBird1]

Unfortunately Arabic, like Japanese and Korean, requires full Unicode support, and this is not going to be available before v9 (and possibly beyond).

Bill,

Are you talking here about both the Actinic UI and the published site as viewed via a browser ? I could live with the Actininc UI in English, so long as I could publish the content in Arabic ?

Thanks

John

[wjcampbe]

Alan,

No - Access is not the problem, Unicode data has been supported since Access 2000.

John,

The whole Actinic application centres around the fact that Actinic rewrites what you put into the interface into usable static html. That process has to produce the Arabic output and currently it does not...

But

You generate the standard content then write Arabic 'pagelets' in alternative software and "include" the contents into a new single product page, with the "buy" button built using the 'add to cart from anywhere on the internet' fix...

Hide the original page(s)...

Build Navigation using Arabic scripted image buttons...

Doable, but a lot of work.

[TBird1]

Bill/Alan,

Thanks for the input. In light of the comments made above I hope you agree its not unreasoanble for me to ask here - does anybody knows of other products similar to Actinic that would support Arabic ?

Thanks again,

John