Inspiring

Answered

Text Direction

Forum|Forum|11 months ago
April 10, 2025
4 replies
1416 views

I'm using InDesign for an Arabic book, so I downloaded the Middle East version.

My issue is that a few textboxes have words written backwards and when I delete and try to type the words correctly, they're also written backwards.

Any advice? Thank you.

Correct answer Joel Cherney

Here you go. The five text boxes in the upper left corner.

Thank you.

Those five text frames have left-to-right paragraph direction applied. There are many ways you could resolve that. Does the text in all five of those frames have a paragraph style applied? If so, make sure that it's set up to be right-to-left, and that there are no overrides applied:

That's the best way to handle text in InDesign - everything has a paragraph style, no overrides are applied to the style. But there are quick and dirty methods as well:

Edit: wait a minute here, I should have put on my glasses before responding. Those five text boxes have the World-Ready Composer turned off, I think. That can be turned on in the paragraph style:

or in the flyout menu of the Paragraph panel:

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @dalia_6212,

I hope the suggestions from experts helped sort things out with the reversed text issue. If you're still running into trouble, please do share an update.

Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Abhishek

D

dalia_6212Author

Inspiring

Hello, Abhishek. I posted a few replies to the kind ppl who got back to me.

I opened paragraph style, but I'm not sure what to do in order to make sure the text stops writing Arabic backwards and nonsensically.

Thank you.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @dalia_6212,

I really appreciate you trying out the steps. Since the issue is still persisting, could you kindly share a short screen recording showing what exactly happens when you try to type in Arabic?

Looking forward to your update!

^
Abhishek

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Has the paragraph style the correct language and direction selection.

Is a character style used which has different settings?

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dalia_6212Author

Inspiring

I opened paragraph style. How do I ensure that the settings are correct?

Thank you.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Go step by step through all the categories of the style.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Make sure you have the correct language assigned to the words that are backwards. Language is a character-level attribute that allows you to mix words from differnt languages in the same paragraph.