Good day,
I'd like the contents of my arabic word document (a bunch of sentences written in arabic with punctuation marks) to notepad such that when I open my notepad, the marks will be on the left not the right. Arabic is a right to left language so the full stop should be at the end of the sentence.

I tried the following:
-copy contents of word document to notepad and save the notepad document with ANSI, UNICODE, and UTF8 encoding
-save word document as PLAIN TEXT and the encoding is WINDOWS (Default), UNICODE, UTF8

None of these worked. The other options in the dialog that pops up when you choose plain text as the format such as C/R, INSERT BREAKS, etc were left untouched.

The ONLY solution I found was to right click at the end of each line in the notepad file, select INSERT UNICODE CONTROL CHARACTER then choose LRE.
Even though this is a solution, it's not the best solution. Today I had 3 lines. Tomorrow I'll have a 100! I can't do this for every file.

So how do I do this?

Thank you

Have you tried Word's 'Save As' options, to see whether any of them outputs a plain text file in the format you want?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Yes I did. I mentioned it. It's the second line starting with a -

I clicked save as then chose plain text then clicked ok then a dialog box popped up asking about encoding. I clicked OK the first time and the second time instead of clicking ok right away I chose OTHER then chose ARABIC and UTF8. So that's 3 attempts. No result. Punctuation was still on the right.

Are your system's regional settings configured for arabic? If not, that may be at the heart of the issue.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

ya i installed the right to left scripts in regional settings when i installed my os xp. it's odd!

Installing support for left-right scripts is not the same as having, say, Algeria, Saudi Arabia or Iran as your location.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

XP:
reigional settings - advanced - the first combo list I chose Arabic (UAE).

Is there anything else I should have done in my regional settings?

I would have thought that would be enough. Does it not work with that setting?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

no sorry it's not working. but i guess it's ok. i mean, subtitle workshop puts everything in order. But it really bugs me you know. I'm sure there is a very simple and straight forward solution to this >.<

more on that later. I got a new problem. I'd like to write subscripts on word and move that to notepad. is something like that remotely possible?