Fix a bi-lingual wrong right to left text

Question

I hope I can explain the problem correctly! There is a document contains some sentences in both Persian/Arabic and English in Word which is basically written in "left to right" direction and it is shown correctly because the original author has placed the words manually in correct positions. the image below may describe better:

Answer 1

Please take a look at this blog article which talks about this problem within MS Office products. The treatment of mixed LTR and RTL text actually comes from a mismatch in how plain-text and HTML parsers handle the data.

In essence, it has to do with how the parser makes its assumptions about whether the text is primarily right-to-left or primarily left-to-right.

In MS Word, when you click on the Align Left or Align Right buttons, you essentially strip out formatting which is already there, and apply block-level formatting to the paragraph itself.

It looks like your document was primarily written in RTL text, with some LTR-based English words thrown in. Unfortunately, based on your system settings, when you hit the Align Left or Align Right buttons, the individual Paragraph you are editing probably gets shoved into LTR English-mode, which will do exactly what you are seeing: shift the English words around, and treat each LTR phrase as if it were a RTL word - which makes the ordering go crazy.

One possible solution, while editing this kind of document, might be to look at the LTR and RTL mode options for MS Office. Here are a few resources that might help you, depending on your version of Word:

• Working with RTL Languages in Word (Office 2007 and Earlier)
• Bidirectional Features in Microsoft Word
• How to Type in my Language using Office 2010

I hope this helps!