Arabic-L:GEN:Windows 7 Arabic Problem response

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 23 Apr 2014
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Windows 7 Arabic Problem response

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1)
Date: 23 Apr 2014
From: Alec McAllister <t.a.mcallister at leeds.ac.uk>
Subject: Windows 7 Arabic Problem response

Dear Abu Sammy,

I have never seen this precise problem, but I have seen problems that are
analogous.

This is very unlikely to be a bug in either Windows 7 (but see P.S. below)
or in Word; my university has thousands of people using dozens of
languages, and we don’t experience this problem. Therefore, it is more
likely to be a side-effect of some other setting.

Sometimes it is very difficult to work out exactly which feature is
controlling the behaviour of the keyboard, because it can be affected
(sometimes indirectly) by different settings in Windows itself, in Office
as a whole, and in Word in particular.

There have even been cases when third-party software interferes with input.
I have never experience it myself, but I have heard that an add-in such as
PDF Complete can sometimes have this sort of effect, in which case the
solution would be to disable it.

It might be worth looking at Control Panel … Region and Language …
Keyboards and Languages … Change keyboards … Advanced Key Settings. One or
more key sequences might be defined as (a) shortcut(s) to switch between
keyboard mappings. In particular, if Chinese input is enabled on your
computer, you might find that it is very difficult to switch off the
default shortcuts for changing between the various Chinese input methods,
and those shortcuts can interfere with input in other languages. (To be
precise, it is quite easy to switch the Chinese shortcuts off; the
difficult bit is to make them *stay* switched off. It is as if the software
says “I understand that you want to use this shortcut for an English or
Arabic keyboard, but I insist on using it for Chinese.”)

If more than one keyboard is installed for any particular language, it is
wise to check whether the default keyboard is really the one that you want.
The system might be loading one that doesn’t meet your needs, and then
having to load a different one, in the light of whatever characters you
type next.

It might also be worth looking at the settings within Word. Some of Word’s
keyboard  shortcuts can have unexpected effects on input, particularly
those to do with formatting and Styles, such as Control-Spacebar, which is
the default for “Change whatever text is selected back to the default
formatting/Style”. If you haven’t got anything selected (or don’t realize
that anything is selected), the results of such shortcuts can be a bit
baffling.

The formatting used in the cursor’s location might itself be a factor. This
is a huge oversimplification, but a good mental model is to think that Word
stores the formatting information for a paragraph in the (usually
invisible) paragraph mark that ends the paragraph. If the cursor is before
that mark and you press Return, you create a new paragraph, which inherits
the formatting of the previous one; that formatting might affect subsequent
input. However, if you press Spacebar to pass the paragraph mark, you don’t
create a new paragraph; if there is already a paragraph after that point,
its formatting will be unaffected by the formatting of the previous
paragraph.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Alec McAllister
University of Leeds

P.S. We did find a bug in Windows 7; it causes the Arabic (Egypt) keyboard
to disappear from the list of available keyboards from time to time, but
that bug can’t be causing your problem. It took us seven months to convince
Microsoft that the bug existed, but they have now promised to correct it in
a routine update.

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