From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: Arabic support is not present in redhat linux 8.0 es[ecially Mozilla, thought I've set it during installation. Also in Browsing Arabic Webpages I find problems reading these pages. Every thing written in arabic Webpages,.. files is illegible. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.setting the language in the control Centre 2. 3. Actual Results: the problem still exist Additional info:
I've seen the same thing with Hebrew. Here's what I know about: 1) The default fonts installed by Anaconda for Hebrew (and I'd guess also Arabic) are recognized by the standard Mozilla installer builds for versions 1.3 and 1.4b, and the languages display. 2) In the RedHat xft RPMs for mozilla 1.2 (I'm pretty sure) through 1.4b, you just get the Unicode boxes for the characters of the Middle Eastern scripts. (I think it even fails for East Asian scripts like Japanese as well, which works fine with the non-xft builds). Also, in the Font Preferences for Mozilla, you will see that you get the "No fonts available for this language" string appearing in the "available font" for each type of font under Hebrew (Arabic?). 3) Now install additional Hebrew (Arabic?) fonts. I choose to install the RPM from http://culmus.sourceforge.net, which puts down .afm and .pfa files for a number of Hebrew fonts. These fonts mozilla detects. It's possible that installing PostScript Arabic fonts would work for Arabic as well. 4) But there's the following problem with 1.4b: install the PostScript fonts, and now the xft build crashes when you look at certain Hebrew sites. This does not happen with the non-xft 1.4b that is installed by the Mozilla Talkback build. [I will log this one as a separate bug].
Sounds like it's just a missing fonts issue. As for the problem with Mozilla crashing with certain Hebrew fonts it's possible that you're stumbling across this bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=180309