Arabic letters

[Buffalo Bob]

I load a text file, encoded, with the first two bytes being xFFFE.
I type in Arabic and see the Arabic letters be changed into their correctly
formed shapes as I type. These displayed characters are in the Arabic
UNICODE range of xFE80 to xFEFF.
But when I save the file, the characters that are saved in the file are in
the UNICODE range of x0600 to x06FF. These are only the isolated forms of the
Arabic characters - these are the keystrokes as delivered by the keyboard.
I need to save the well-formed characters that are displayed, not the
isolated forms.
I need to use the well formed characters in another application.
How can I do this?
Why does MSWord display one thing and save another?

Thanks

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Bob,

As I understand it, the presentation forms are only in Unicode for
compatibility reasons.

I bet what you have in your Word doc are not the presentation forms, but the
regular Arabic characters.
Those are rendered, depending on context, to look like the presentation
forms.

You can check that hypothesis:
Select some character,
open the VBA editor (Alt+F11),
open the immediate window (Ctrl+G),
type
? Hex(AscW(Selection.Text))

I doubt that you can easily change those to the corresponding presentation
forms.
You might ask in the microsoft.public.word.international.features
newsgroup... you are more likely to find someone more knowledgeable there.

Regards,
Klaus