arabic

[Robert Lambie]

the best way for a quick solution to this is to ask the customer to write what he wants using a fine black marker.
then digitise the script.. thats what we do if faced with this problem. 😉

[brian the brush]

I agree with Robert, in the past I have used local Asian people to write down the text for signs but in the translation a squiggle in the wrong place can change the meaning of the words, so if your customer writes the wording himself – any mistakes are his.

Brian the Brush.

[Rodney Gold]

There are Truetype arabic fonts out there – downloadable off the internet.
what the others said is 100% – the best way is for the customer to write down and sign off a proof – even better is if they have the font on their wordprocessor and print it out at high resolution to as big a size as they can , you scan and trace using Coreltrace (If you use Corel) and then engrave/print/whatever off that
We do a huge amount of Chinese plaques like that , the customer prints it out , we scan in B+W mode , trace and save as a CMX , import the CMX into Corel and laser engrave.
Arabic text is a bitch to manually digitise , even using a single line path as its very curly and curvy.

[Martin Armitage]

Thanks for the input, I have used the same techniques for chinese signs that we have made in the past but these arabic signs come through a third party, I think i will have to make it the customers responsibility to provide the artwork.