Advise on working with Freehand and the Farsi & Urdu languages

[ericsar]

I have a project requiring me to produce a final Freehand file, with
Farsi and Urdu translated text. My understanding is that Freehand does
not support Farsi and Urdu. My question is this: is there a workaround
to this? Can anybody who has done this job before help me?

Thanks.

[mpjx]

Hi,

I'm not an expert but I'll help as best I can.

First, you must have fonts installed on your system that contain Farsi and
Urdu characters. The only commonly available fonts that I know of with any
chance of having these characters are OpenType fonts.

Second, as far as I understand Freehand MX does not have native support for
the extended character sets available in OpenType fonts. There are 2 ways you
might get round this though, if you are using Mac OSX.

1. Open the Character Palette, find the characters you want and drag them one
by one onto your FreeHand page. I've used this method before and while possible
it takes a long time.

2. Try writing the copy in a text editor that supports unicode. Writie unsing
the characters you want then copy and paste. You may have more success pasting
into the FreeHand Text Editor than directly onto the page. I've not used this
method but it might be worth a try...

Hope this helps

Martin