Text direction formating

[malexandra]

Hi, here’s my problem – I’m copying from Word text in Arabic and pasting it in text boxes. The letters are fine, but all of the punctuation gets wild and goes to the other end of the sentence. The words itself appear, as far as I can tell, without change, it’s just the punctuation that changes and appears to have the opposite locatiotion (as in each stop (.) is at the beginning of the sentence, the bullet points at the end…).
I think it’s something to do with the text direction tool from the text formatting toolbox (right now it’s fixed on left to right) and it doesn’t allow me to change it. I realize that this is fairly minor and most likely pretty stupid question, but I promise, I’ll be forever grateful if someone can point me in the right direction ?
P.S. I work with Corel Draw 12 if it matters.

 

[impulselondon]

That's...a new one. I never thought of this before. If you speak arabic, you may have better luck finding someone who has had the same issue in, say, Photoshop or some such (I would think they're all similar in this regard).

There is a way to set up Windows for arabic as a default font, which may change the default formatting and trickle down to Corel (that's a total guess; I think it then reads the correct way, if not also punctuating correctly).

It could also be that the text you're importing to Corel is being applied against an incorrect font base (ie: either you're importing a true-type font and Corel is auto-correcting letters, or Corel sees the font as curves instead of letters and it's irrelevant as Corel doesn't care what they are at that point anyway).

If you were to download the correct arabic font, you could retype it in Corel. Or you could create a small collection of punctuation symbols at the side of the page and manually place them amongst the text where you need them (that's what I would do if there was enough work to bother with an actual 'system').

 

[malexandra]

Thanks for that, it was all good suggestions. Unfortunately since I don't speak Arabic, it is impossible for me to retype any of it (the symbols are way too small and identical to me). I tried setting Windows to the Arabic default, but that didn't change anything. The font base is identical as the one of the original text and Corel is showing the letters (as far as I can tell) as accurately as they appear on the word version. It's only the freaking punctuation, I’m manually changing at the moment But thanks for trying to help anyway!

 

[javabearSTL]

It might have more to do with the base language that Windows is set to and that Draw was installed for than anything else.

If you have access to an Arabic version of Windows, etc, you might try looking at the files there to see. Other than that, you might try calling Corel's tech support on this one.