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Working with Arabic text in Agility Email Distributions

Updated this week

Please note that, in general, we discourage copying and pasting directly from Word, as no online editor can support all the features that Word offers. This process can sometimes carry over hidden formatting into the Agility copy which can be difficult to correct.

In the case of right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, the following steps can be taken to reduce the chances of running into text formatting issues:

We need to clear all Word formatting first. To do this, we will use Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac), or any other plain-text editor that allows text direction changes.

Open a new Notepad file and then right-click in the page and switch to right-to-left reading order.

In TextEdit:

  1. Format > Make plain text

  2. Format > Text > Writing Direction > Right to Left

Select all of the Arabic text and then copy-paste from Word to Notepad. This will clear out all Word formatting.

Then, copy-paste all the text from Notepad into the Agility editor. The text will display from left to right.

Then select all the text in the text box and apply right to left alignment.

And finally, with all the text selected, apply Arabic language.

The text should now all appear correctly and you can apply other formatting as needed.

Please note that in the process of copy-pasting to a plain text editor, all embedded links are removed. These will have to be added back manually after you have corrected the formatting for the Arabic text.

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