But if the Arabic IME isn't installed (it's not difficult if it isn't
in out-of-the-box Vista -- I even made a salesman find the language
capabilities when Vista first came out, and the interface looks
identical to the XP Pro interface), the contextual ligatured forms of
the letters won't happen. Fonts existed pre-Unicode (and pre-Arabic
IMEs) for typing Arabic, where you typed backward and chose from up to
four variants of each letter (I did all the Arabic and Syriac sections
of *The World's Writing Systems* that way, in FrameMaker for Mac, of
course), but AFAIK no such fonts are available any more, because
Windows comes with support for just about all the relevant scripts.
On Feb 6, 10:43*am, "Bob Buckland ?:-\)" 75214.226(At Beautiful
Downtown)compuserve.com wrote:
Hi grammatim,
In Windows XP the Arabic IME wouldn't be installed as a default in English language Windows XP which in Office's language settings
tool would usually be indicated by the '(limited support)' marking on languages listed in the Office language tool, and that would
need to be installed as an additional Windows component then made available on the language bar through the Regional and Language
settings.
In Vista it seems that sopme language capabilities are more 'auto installed'.
For Word, the availability of the right to left icon in Word doesn't much care if the language support is actually installed in
Windows, only that a 'right-to-left' language/complex script *has been set to be included by the Office language tool. 
================
* "grammatim" wrote in ...
In XP, if you select the Arabic IME from the Status Bar, it gives you
properly ligated Arabic using whatever the system's Arabic font may be
(and then you can select the text and change it to whichever better-
looking Arabic font you prefer; you can also set your default font in
the "Complex Scripts" part of the Format | Font panel). It doesn't
seem like the sort of thing that would have changed much in Vista.