I am not a user of Arabic, but from your description of needs, it may well be that Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.1 will work. It supports Arabic, bidirectional text, complex searches, etc. You'd have to see from the web site or trial download if it will do the custom highlighting (somehow, from having used it a while back in earlier versions for projects, I suspect it will).
best
Grover
Grover A. Zinn William H. Danforth Professor of Religion (emeritus) former Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Oberlin College Oberlin, OH 44074 440-775-8866 (department) grover.zinn@oberlin.edu
On Sep 11, 2011, at 2:46 PM, Maxim Romanov wrote:
Dear all,
I wonder if anyone can help me with the following problem. I am tagging Arabic texts (classical Arabic sources, mostly biographical dictionaries and chronicles) to be converted into XML format for the following analysis. Currently I am doing that in MS Word 2007, which, despite all improvements, does not handle long text files well and crashes from time to time. I was desperately trying to find a good alternative, but did not succeed so far. I need a text editor which have/do the following: • Support for bi-directional text and Unicode; • Support for large text files (mine are not too big, but may go up to 20Mb of TXT in UTF-8; Yaqut’s Mu‘jam al-Buldan is ~9Mb, Ibn ‘Imad’s Shadharat al-Dhahab is ~8Mb; Ibn al-Jawzi’s al-Muntazam is 12Mb); • Changing Font and its Size; • Custom Highlighting: an editable list of symbols and phrases (in Arabic) to be highlighted for visibility. The sources I work with have a number of technical topoi (most obvious examples are the words like bab, fasl, harf etc.) that mark the structure of the book as well as transition points between information of different kind (for example, in al-Sam‘ani’s Kitab al-ansab the explanation of most of nisba names begins with phrases like wa-hadhihi-l-nisba ila and ends with wa-l-mashhur bi-hadhihi-l-nisba, or wa-ilay-ha, or wa- ntasaba[t] ila etc.). Having them highlighted makes the structure of the test highly visible and tagging process much faster and easier. • The editor should be stable and fast. I will deeply appreciate any comments and suggestions.
Best regards, Maxim G. Romanov
PhD Candidate in Arabic & Islamic Studies Department of Near Eastern Studies University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI, U.S.A.
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