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I have installed Arabic language support using the language tool, but I am still unable to get this page to render correctly:

http://www.iamcal.com/understanding-bidirectional-text/

Which fonts do I need to install to stop seeing squares instead of Arabic characters? I would prefer fonts that are available in the Ubuntu repositories.

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2 Answers

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The Language Support section in Ubuntu lets you change the interface language, in other words, the menus, panels and other elements. It has nothing to do with the way a web page is displayed.

I am no expert in Arabic, but usually, if a web page is not displayed correctly, what you need to change is its character encoding,
View -> Character Encoding in Firefox.

The source code of the page has the following:

charset=UTF-8

font-family: georgia, helvetica, times new roman, serif;
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The Language Support tool in Ubuntu will install additional fonts depending on the language you select, I believe. Therefore, it does affect the way web pages are displayed. That particular page is encoded correctly, the issue is that I don't have a font installed that contains that particular Arabic character. – Flimm Nov 21 '11 at 20:09
The problem for me was that the font-family got interpreted as "times new roman", which included (or refered to another font for) glyphs of some, but not all, arabic characters. Changing the font-family in css with firebug to have "scheherazade" as the first element renders all the arabic characters (correctly, I believe, but my arabic is very poor). This requires that one has fonts-sil-scheherazade package installed. Unfortunately, I don't know how to actually fix the problem, instead of mucking around with manual css trickery. – taneli Nov 18 '12 at 20:33
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Try to install ubuntu-restricted-extras Install ubuntu-restricted-extras. It adds some more Microsoft fonts.

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i think that doesnt provide those fonts help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats – Jai Oct 10 '12 at 14:31

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