Many thanks to you for your contribution, that was very efficient ..
About the embedFonts condition you find confusing, actually I don’t quite understand why Flash treats embedded fonts differently in terms of character metrics, I found that by try and error, not based on any information regarding Arabic vs. Flash, for example, when I try to detect characters width for wrapping it behaves differently based on embedFonts property, that’s why I do recommend to always embed Arabic Fonts, this way you should get proper Arabic rendering ..
If you can find me an explanation about embedFonts and Arabic glyphs in Flash it would be great ..
Thanks again for your updates to this method

@Yousif

This method definitely renders Arabic characters properly on Mac, but I don’t think you can force the embedded YouTube Flash Player to use this method for Arabic rendering, unless you can find a way to load videos directly from YouTube (without using their player), in this case you can build you own player using this method, only by then you can have proper Arabic rendering in your own player

@Salman
@Ammar
@Jan
@Yousif

My apologies for such late reply, it’s true that I have been busy recently ..
I did my best to cover all your issues in this new version, you’re still welcome to review and comment on this one

Is this script going to be helpful in this case? and how to use it :$

best regards

Yousif

First of all: Thank you very much for this great AS2 class. I do not know anything about Arabian characters or grammar, but I think I found bugs and possible enhancements:

1) Fix double line breaks (@Ammar: That could fix your problems)

Add
Line input = input.split(“\r\n”).join(“\n”);
after the comment “// strip hard lines-breaks”

2) Fix wrong line breaks (Ahmed: I sent you a test fla via email):

Replace:
if (temp._width<tag._width-tagFormat.leftMargin-tagFormat.rightMargin) {
By:
if (temp._width<tag._width-(tagFormat.leftMargin ? tagFormat.leftMargin : 0)- (tagFormat.rightMargin ? tagFormat.rightMargin : 0)) {

3) Improve "hasDigitsOrLatin"-loop:

Add a "break" command when a latinChars was found (just for performance).

—-

Two thinks I am confused about:

1) There are some if-Statements like "if (tag.embedFonts) { …": I do not understand why embedded fonts should be processed in a different way than not-embedded text formats. In my tests with NOT-embedded text formats I replaced all if conditions with true (like "if (true ||tag.embedFonts) {") to handle NOT-embedded text format like the embedded ones (otherwise the algorithm did not work properly for me).

2) What about upper case letters in the definition:
var latinChars:String = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890″?
The latinChars string is used with indexof and, imho, indexof is case sensitive and I do not see any reason why lower case latin characters should differ from upper case ones.

Jan

seems 1 new line in my input produces “\r\n”
which while being split each becomes a br and results in 2 newlines in flash.

so I just removed one of the joins and now it works!

input = input.split(“\r”).join(“”);
and leave \n alone

didn’t really get what was happening in your function, but tried to comment:
input = input.split(“\n”).join(“”);
input = input.split(“\r”).join(“”);

which fixed it but messed everything else!

so any idea?

FYI: I’m reseting width of my text field for full screen thru AS. However your script works fine normal mode.

I think it’s a Font issue, I use unicode charts for Arabic Presentation Forms-B (glyphs from FE70 to FEFE according to the Unicode Standard 5.2), may be this is your issue, can you try one of these fonts and tell me if you still have the same bug? (those fonts has full representation Form-B)
Thank you for your compliment

Well, it’s not a patch that affects every object, also not quite a library for flash ..
Basically it’s a String Parsing method (custom AS based function), which analyze and re-order Arabic glyphs in a proper manner with correct rendering on windows, mac and linux, furthermore, it supports custom fonts ..
Regular TextField in Flash does not understands right-to-left languages, so it can not map custom fonts, no word wrapping and even breaks the string on mac machines ..
I did not hack into Flash or use third-party techniques to solve this, all I did is simply instruct Flash to render Arabic language manually using ActionScript by finding and replacing Arabic characters with its correct forms from unicode charts, my method has nothing to do with any special features added to ActionScript (since version 1.0) or to Flash Player (since version 5), it’s just a workaround ..
I left my solution absolutely free and open for anyone who can understand my approach and build similar methods for other right-to-left languages, even update my own for better usage ..
I hope I’ve helped understanding what this is all about

if the former, can you explain for dumb user, in details, what to do ?

many thanks in advance

by the way I noticed a bug with the number ٤ and ٦ when I write them in arabic in the xml and when I replaced them with 4 & 6 it’s worked I’m just telling you because u did a great job and you should know if there is any bug.

Thanks again