Reply #21: "Islamic" computers might be in Malay or Indonesia.

[Igel]

They go from left to right, since they use Latin.

The point is that computers aren't "Islamic" or not. Their software can be for a right-to-left or left-to-right language. Even Arab Xians writing in Arabic need right-to-left software.

My computer, running Windows XP Professional, has only a slight problem with right-to-left encoding. Word XP (2002) handles it. It's right justified and reads right to left. Handy for Arabic and Persian. In fact, there's a little button on a toolbar; I haven't needed it for a couple of years, but from time to time I click it and everything's right justified, ragged left.

It's a bit goofy in that it's obviously a kludge, since my computer has English as the default system language and left-to-right as the default text. So when I would type Arabic it would have to sort of do it strangely--it would "feel" like left-to-right, but it would be "fixed" to right-to-left. The problem was that my computer's default was left to right. If I had an Arabic version of Word running on an Arabic copy of Windows, no problem.

I don't know if Macs have an easier time with it or not. Don't know if more up-to-date versions of Windows handles Arabic better or not.