Arabic numbers (Word 2003)

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Edited by HansV to replace Word doc with the picture it contained – saves the user a few clicks

Does anyone know how to get Arabic numbers to work on Word (not the Arabic numbers that we use in English (1,2,3,etc.), but rather, the Arabic numbers used in Arabic, which are based on Indian numerals–see attached). I tried installing the Arabic keyboard, but only the Arabic letters work; the numbers show up as the same ones that come up in English.

Thank you in advance,

John

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Did you enable support for complex scripts, in the Languages tab of the Regional Settings control panel? If so, you should be able to specify Hindi (=Arabic) numbering in the Complex Scripts tab of Tools | Options in Word.

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Well that worked like a charm, except for one problem. When I chose Hindi numerals in Tools/Options, it changed the appearance of my numbers in all my documents. The same thing happened when I tried to set the document view from right to left (as it should be in the Arabic language). Is there a way to isolate these changes to only my Arabic documents, keeping my English documents unchanged?

Best regards,

JMT

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Do you have the option “Context” in the Numeral dropdown list?

Text direction should depend on the language you set for spell checking – left to right for English, and right-to-left for Arabic.

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I tried context before and it didn’t do anything; but this time it works and leaves my English text docments in tact.

Is there a way to also change the settings to reflect Arabic for numbering (so that Word puts numbers to the right of the content that comes after), page numbering (so that page 1 is at the end of the book) and commas (so they come out reversed, as they are written in Arabic)?

Regards,

JMT

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Hopefully, somebody else can help you with that. I don’t use Arabic myself. Sorry.

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Dear Hans,

When you said “Text direction should depend on the language you set for spell checking – left to right for English, and right-to-left for Arabic,” what did you mean? How do I set language for spell checking?

Sincerely,

JMT

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Tools | Language | Set Language…
You can also set the language for a style, so you could create styles that use English and other styles that use Arabic. To set the language for a style, right-click it in the Styles and Formatting task pane, select Modify… from the popup menu, then select Format | Language… in th eModify Style dialog.

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