Is anyone working with Arabic?

[Lars Brehmer]

I am working with Arabic for the first time and have a problem. First  
of all, I do not speak, read or write Arabic, so I can't spot things  
that might be obvious.  This project if for a friend who is learning  
Arabic. He will eventually enter his own content, and my Arabic  
content is just gibberish for testing purposes.

So far, most things work as predicted - the Arabic font, right to left  
text, etc. (looks weird by the way - the insertion point stays at the  
right as new characters are added/deleted at the left)

The only problem so far is this;

The bilingual content is stored as a tab delimited list in a custom  
property. When I filter the custom property without empty, I lose all  
of the content of the custom property except the first line or 2. I  
finally noticed after much frustration that this seems to happen when  
there is more than one arabic word in an item, that is I lose all of  
the content starting with the first space in an Arabic item.
The only thing I could think of is that the ASCII number of a space  
using the Arabic keyboard layout differs from the ASCII number of a  
European keyboard layout, but they are both 32.

I found out a long time ago that when a " appears in such a tab  
delimited list custom property, it causes weird things to happen, but  
I can easily work around it, and it never caused content in the custom  
property to just disappear while filtering without empty. Is there  
something about Arabic text that I obviously don't know? For now, all  
I can do is NOT filter without empty, which I do routinely in scripts  
because an empty line in the custom property would be a big problem  
for this particulat stack.

Anyone have an idea about this?

Also, when Runrev "supports" Arabic, does that mean that sorting  
aplphabetically works correctly? I can see that the text lines are  
indeed sorted by the first letter, but I obviously can't tell whether  
it is alphabetical.

Cheers,


Lars