Arabic text on web sites

How can I read them

[hasanali]

Sometimes, people send me emails written in Arabic, but when I open the emails in yahoo or hotmail, I do not get the arabic text. Instead I get all the funny characters.

How can I ensure that I can read the Arabic text on the web pages.

Do I need to change something on my machine, or is it server-side setting?

Thanks

[larryhatch]

Hasanali: If my experience is any help, you need to download some sort of extended character set
which includes Arabic. You might get Hebrew and Farsi included at the same time.

I did this so I could display Chinese and Japanese characters properly. That worked perfectly.
All the characters render nicely, even in my regular mail. I'm even displaying Russian Cryllic emails.

The character set files go into your computer, its nothing server side that I know of.

Google for Arabic character sets. One complication might be whether they read right to left of not.

[encyclo]

If you are running Windows, try Windows Update or the microsoft.com typography section:

[microsoft.com...]

You should be able to download the fonts for Arabic and many other languages.

[Gusgsm]

If you are in Windows, from Control Panel -> Language support (keyboard and text services, afaik), add the Arabic one. Have your Windows CD-ROM at hand as the system will ask for it.

It's rather easy to do. Ma'a salama.

[hasanali]

Thanks everyone

I beieve most of the suggestions posted would allow me to setup Arabic fonts on my XP machine.

I have done it and it works fine. I am ablw to write Arabic text in Microsoft Word and in any other aplication.

The problem is in reading Arabic text in Yahoo and Hotmail. For instance, in Yahoo mail, I wrote an email in Arabic and sent it to me (when I am writing the email in Arabic, it is written in correct format). Once I received the email, the Arabic text was converted into unreadable charatcers.

THE SOLUTION
The solution is to do the follwoing:
Go to View > Encoding and chose the appropriate language (in my case Arabic). This would reload teh page and display the arabic text correctly.

regards