Word 2011 and Arabists

Time is slipping us by, and June 2012 is almost upon us. While it may not mean the Mayan end of the world (that is only in December), it means the end of MobileMe. And since everything is connected, at least for me that sets a whole lot of things in motion.

MobileMe means calendar synchronization. I cannot live without that in my workday, so end of June also means that I have to jump onto iCloud. It is possible to sync an iCal calendar under 10.6 with iCloud, but it also connects with Address Book, Back to my Mac and other stuff which is also very useful, and do require proper iCloud access. And sometime one must make the upgrade, so it will be iCloud for me. Which means that I must install Lion. Which means that I lose access to Rosetta programs (that is, programs made before the Mac became an Intel machine in 2006).

I have been kind of preparing for this for some time, checking out which essential programs will not run under Lion and which I will have to replace or say goodbye to. I have already discussed my old email program, Eudora, which I can no longer then use, and how to access my old email under the new system. I have upgraded those that require upgrading, and some things will have to go; for which I must either live without, use on an older Mac, or find a replacement program (like the useful Iconographer, a small specialized tool that will not be upgraded). And I hope that my favourite solitaire game, Solitaire till Dawn, will finally make the jump some day soon.

But, of course, willingly or not, our working day is dominated by Microsoft Office and its Word, certainly as long as we collaborate with others. Office 2008 has been OK for me, but I have kept the previous version, Word 2004, around primarily for one purpose: macros. That is where the "Arabists" in the title kicks in: In the mid-2000s, I created a fairly large library of Word macros that converted transliteration diacritics (which we who use non-Western languages need) to the modern Unicode fonts. They work in NisusWriter and Word, but the Word part (which most people need) was suddenly made obsolete when Word 2008 no longer could use macros. I still have hundreds of old Word files - some fairly important, such as book and article manuscripts - written in my pre-Unicode Jaghbub font, so I had to keep Word 2004 afloat to run my conversion macros in it whenever I was going to use such documents in a Unicode setting. And Word 2004 is Rosetta based, so it will not run under Lion.

Therefore, Lion means also getting hold of Office 2011, which was supposed to reinstate macro support, and also have some support for Arabic. I have not made the Lion jump yet (we are still in May), but I have now installed Office, to check out how it works for these our peculiar purposes.

First test, then, was: Would they run my old 2004 font conversion macros, or would I have to rewrite them (I really really do not understand macro language, it was all cut & paste; trial & error). Sigh of relief: they run just fine and exactly like in Word 2004, with no modification. (I have only tested my own Jaghbub version, but the code is the same, so they should all work.) However, installation is not as convenient; you can no longer just drop them in a "Startup" folder to have them always available; you have either to activate the macro file for each session, or install selected macros into your "Normal.dotm" settings file. But we can live with that, most people will only convert from the one or two old font they have used, so it is a one-off installation procedure.

Second issue: What was this thing about Arabic? Until now, Word has never been able to display Arabic on the Mac. It has of course been a major drag for Arabic users. Rumours said that in Word 2011, you could edit already existing, but not start writing new Arabic text. Sounded very strange.

And very strange it is. Officially, there is no Arabic support at all, there is no indication that Word should allow writing right-to-left. But it does, in a peculiar and limited way. I cannot say I understand it, but Word apparently "brands" text as either Arabic or Latin, irrespective of what it actually is. And if the word is branded Latin, it will never connect properly, whatever you do with it. But if you can get Word to see it as Arabic, then you can edit, copy, write more and all you want. The trick is to get to that point.
     The approved way, then, is to open some document which contains Arabic; then Word will recognize that and allow you to edit it. I tried that, and it worked! I typed a few Arabic words in a TextEdit document, saved as .rtf, and opened in Word 2011. The Arabic came up fine - wrong font, left adjusted, but I could correct that and keep typing Arabic in that section. Then, I added some English text below, and tried to switch to Arabic below that again - and no go. The letters remained disconnected, as in the old days. But if copied some of the "good" Arabic and pasted below the English, it remained OK and I could continue typing. So correct: edit imported, but not initiate new.
      That was on my Mac at home. But then, having posted this excellent news on my Arabic Mac web page, I tried the same at the office - and nothing worked. Same Mac system 10.6, same Word 2011, same procedure in every way. But it was absolutely impossible to get Word to accept any Arabic imported from either TextEdit, NisusWriter or Mellel. However, when I brought in the TextEdit document I had made at home, everything worked fine. So, I was stumped, I cannot TimeMachine my own actions back to what I did at home that was different, but I had to amend my advice to "this may or may not work for you". (But Word for Windows and OpenOffice Arabic documents did work, so it is may have something to do with the .rtf format used by Nisus/TextEdit.)

Anyway, the trick I did find, and which works is: if you at any point do get a workable Arabic text paragraph into Word 2011, create a Style from that text, and save it as a global "template", which is then available in all new documents. The Arabic sticks, and you can in that way actually write Arabic even in new documents you create.

The third "legacy" element was to see if Word 2011 still could open older Word 5 documents. In Word 2004, you just double-clicked on any Word document and it opened. In Word 2008, that gave a stupid dialogue box about older files being "blocked for security" (why? the only security issue is macros, and Word 5 didn't have such). But you could open older files by using the "Open" command within Word. Was that still the case, or had support for older files completely gone? Minor relief: the same "blocked" box on double-clicking, but Word 2011 opens old files just as easily as Word 2008 (back to about 1992; that is Word 5.1 and higher. Word 2004 can go a couple of years further back), and apparently with everything correctly displayed as far as I can see.

So, on the whole, Word 2011 is probably no worse, and in a couple of ways actually an improvement on Word 2008 for maintaining old documents from our past. They upgrade curve is also less onerous in that menus etc. are mostly identical to those we know from Word 2008. I have not used the 2011 version much yes, but on the whole it seems that the upgrade has been less wrenching than moving from one version to another has been before.

In other words, that Lion hurdle has thus been passed. On to the next.