OpenOffice working right with Arabic on Ubuntu

Finally got OpenOffice working right with arabic documents.

When I try to open Arabic documents that have been written in MSWord, the text would be invisible or unreadable somehow. If I highlight the text, I notice that it shows that is using some font that I don’t have, such as “Traditional Arabic” or “Arabic Transparent”. When I change the font of the highlighted text to some Arabic font on my system it becomes visible and look fine.

I solved this problem by:

1. sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

This fixed the fonts that were in originally in “Traditional Arabic” but it didn’t work for custom uncommon arabic fonts or “Arabic Transparent”

2. OpenOffice > Tools > Options > Openoffice.org > Fonts > Apply replacement Table, Then create a map between the non-existing arabic font and an existing font from your system.

For example, I made a replacement entry to replace “Arabic Transparent” with “ae_AlMohanad”. And we are done