To enable the right-to-left features in Visio, you must be running a 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating system that has right-to-left support— for example, the Arabic version of Microsoft Windows XP or any language version of Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3.

Note  Not all of the programs in Office support each right-to-left function or feature described in this topic. To find out if a specific program has a feature, see Help for the program you are using.

The user interface language is the language that appears in menus, dialog boxes, and wizards.

The Microsoft Windows operating system uses an indicator on the taskbar (or on the Language bar, if it is visible) to display the current keyboard language. For example, the indicator for Arabic is .

Direction (direction: Specifies the reading order, alignment, and/or visual appearance of right-to-left text and documents, regardless of the keyboard language. Direction also describes how the user interface, controls, and other screen objects are oriented.) is a general term that describes the reading order (reading order: The visual order in which characters, words, and groups of words are displayed. English and most other European languages are displayed in left-to-right order and Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu are displayed in right-to-left order.), alignment, and overall layout of screen elements. When right-to-left and left-to-right text are used together in the same sentence, paragraph, or control, the combined text is referred to as bidirectional or mixed.

The appearance of the insertion point varies to indicate a left-to-right run (run: A contiguous piece of text or string of characters sharing the same attributes. All characters in a run have the same directional properties.) or a right-to-left run . The cursor moves according to the direction of the language encountered (logical movement).

In Visio you can select, find, and replace individual diacritics (diacritics: Markings that are printed above, below, or next to a character that indicate how to pronounce it.) and individual Arabic characters regardless of whether they are ligated. Each ligature and diacritic is managed as a discrete unit of a right-to-left language word.

The following example shows an Arabic word with a three-character ligature (as each character is selected).

In Microsoft Office 2003, you can save files in HTML (HTML: The standard markup language used for documents on the World Wide Web. HTML uses tags to indicate how Web browsers should display page elements such as text and graphics and how to respond to user actions.) format for posting on the Web in right-to-left or left-to-right direction. Web pages with right-to-left direction are marked with the standard HTML DIR attribute in the HTML file. If the Web browser you are using recognizes the DIR attribute, the page will be displayed with right-to-left direction. If the DIR attribute is not recognized, the page will be displayed with left-to-right direction.

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Microsoft Office 2003 programs support the following code pages available to Arabic, Hebrew, and mixed-text users.

Arabic   UTF-8, ISO 8859-6, DOS-720, ASMO-708

Hebrew   UTF-8, ISO 8859-8, DOS-86

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