English and Arabic in the same sentence.

[kathyP@cpg]

I am working in a project for a manual there has part numbers in sentence. I can't get the part number to read correctly. Anytime there is a hyphen with numbers and letters it flip.

Example:

English (these numbers are in a sentence with other arabic words):

300-TH

300-TH/SK: 45 kg

Arabic (this is what i get and i can't flip)

TH-300

TH/SK: 45-300

any ideas.

[Bob_Niland]

What does the Paragraph Format have for the [Direction] tab?

[kathyP@cpg]

it is Inherit because the document is right to left. If I change the paragraph to left to right it flips the whole paragraph, which I can't have because the sentence starts with a bullet point.

[Bob_Niland]

kathyP: …it is Inherit because the document is right to left.

I may be of limited help here, never having needed to work with RTL documents.

I would have expected FM to have some way of dealing with mixed-direction text, but some searching doesn't turn up anything except for structured documents.

Various hacks come to mind, like
◊ run-in ¶formats with LTR set,
◊ variables for the LTR strings, or
◊ using some non-standard mark-up for the hyphens, so that the algorithm doesn't mess with them.
Character Format doesn't have a field for direction, alas.

I would be pleasantly surprised if FM honored any of these Unicode control characters:
U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING
U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING
U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING
U+202D LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE
U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE
but I haven't tested any.