The tips and tricks that I shall share with you today have to do with bidirectional (Bidi) features in Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Word was designed to work with multilingual documents. It is capable of fully representing writings of different languages and scripts including Bidi scripts (such as Arabic or Hebrew). Bidi scripts are written from right-to-left (RTL) while numbers and other scripts are written from left-to-right (LTR).
Word will automatically tag text with the appropriate text direction based on the keyboard language from which it was entered. Numbers and neutral characters such as spaces and punctuation can layout or shape differently based on its tagging.
Word has a number of options that affect settings for all documents and affect how contents are displayed. You can get to these options through Office button à Word Options à Advanced à Show Document Content.
- Digit Substitution: Specify the type of digits/numerals in a Word document. These can be different from what is specified in the OS Control Panel settings. See section 3, “Using the Hindi Numerals” in my 5 Access Settings for the Right-to-Left languages blog.
- Colored Diacritics: In Word you can change the color of diacritics by selecting the Use this color for diacritics option. For example, the following shows the diacritic as red.
- Document View: This option affects how content is displayed in the whole document (Right-to-left or Left-to-right).
You can change the direction of a section in your document by changing the Page Layout à Page Setup à Layout à Section direction field.
This affects the text flow within that section including column flow and line numbering. Alternately, there is a checkbox in the Page Layout à Page Setup à Columns à More Columns dialog that will change the section direction to RTL if checked.
Also, if a gutter margin is needed, you can specify the Gutter position to be on the right or left side. If you have different odd and even headers and you choose Right, the gutters of odd-numbered pages will appear on the right, and the gutters of even-numbered pages will appear on the left.
Tables & Paragraphs
You can change the direction of the flow of cells in a table by changing the Table direction field in the Table Properties dialog.
The paragraph direction can be set by clicking on the appropriate button in the Paragraph chunk under the Home tab.
Most Bidi features depend on the editing language(s) enabled in Office. Please refer to the article How to type in my language using office 2010 if you are not familiar with the concept of an Office editing language.
You can add Kashidas to Arabic text and other related scripts to help in line justification. There are three types supported in Word, Justify Low, Justify Medium, and Justify High, which affect the number of Kashidas used.
Kashida (also known as tatweel) is a character elongation used in Arabic language to increase the length of words for justification. It does not affect the sound or meaning of the word. It is used in text justification instead of white space. Kashidas are entered automatically in line justification or can be entered manually using the Shift+J keys between two Arabic characters on an Arabic keyboard. Note: you can enter multiple Kashidas (see the following example).
You can change the font, size, and style used to render complex scripts which is a superset of bidirectional text. You can do so in the Font dialog under the Font chunk in the Home tab. Under the Complex scripts section, you can choose the font, size, and style used to render complex scripts.
Word automatically combines Arabic characters into ligatures as appropriate. However, if you need to separate characters (e.g., for part numbers), or want to show the initial, medial, or final shape of a character without typing a character after it (e.g., for educational purposes), you can insert Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ) or Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) characters (respectively).
You can insert these characters by using the Symbol dialog (Insert à Symbols à Symbol à More Symbols). Open the dialog, sel