Opening RTF file in Farsi characters/words are missing

Question

In opening an RTF file written in Farsi - or English and Farsi - many of the letters/words are missing. If I open the file up in Microsoft Word for Mac the words are there, although left-to-right rather right-to-left. (Again Microsoft screws with us as Microsoft Word on Windows will do the right-to-left.)
The same missing letters/words are found in TextEdit.
Interestingly enough OpenOffice opens the file right-to-left with all of the words/characters there.
I did take this problem to a Apple Genius at an Apple Store yesterday and he confirmed it's a software problem.
My question is when will it be fixed and does it affect other right-to-left non-standard character sets like Hebrew.
Thanks. Rick

Answer 1

Rick Good wrote:
In opening an RTF file written in Farsi - or English and Farsi - many of the letters/words are missing. If I open the file up in Microsoft Word for Mac the words are there, although left-to-right rather right-to-left. (Again Microsoft screws with us as Microsoft Word on Windows will do the right-to-left.)
MsWord for Mac is pretty useless for multilingual support especially RtoL.
The same missing letters/words are found in TextEdit.
Did you export as Unicode text from MsWord for Windows, which has excellent RtoL support? See if .doc works.
Interestingly enough OpenOffice opens the file right-to-left with all of the words/characters there.
I did take this problem to a Apple Genius at an Apple Store yesterday and he confirmed it's a software problem.
My question is when will it be fixed and does it affect other right-to-left non-standard character sets like Hebrew.
Good question, all RtoL text in OSX is practically unworkable, especially when trying to edit it and any English text within RtoL. This is something I have been "offering feedback" to Apple since OSX came out supposedly with full Unicode and multi-lingual support. 10 years ago!
Right up to OSX 10.2.3 I was frankly misled by Apple (not allowed to use the 3 letter word here) who made out that I was doing something wrong (what an unusual approach by Apple!). Even then I did not get the truth from Apple but from a sympathetic developer.
Meanwhile it ruined my reputation with a few key clients and cost me a motza on the jobs I was doing for them.
The only working RtoL support you are going to get in OSX is [Mellel|http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8712/mellel] . But my recommendation is to stick to MsWord on Windows where you will be able to do more in the way of layout.
Peter