arabic order of digits back to front

[PIET444]

I am trying to paste a line in arabic from a word document into indesign. In the word document it is aligned correctly right to left. When I paste it into indesign it changes the order of characters to back to front and sticks to it even when i change the character direction to right to left. All it does is that it aligns it to the left or right. But the order of digits is still back to front. I have installed the arabic version of Indesign. What else can i do? 

This is the example. The explamation mark should be in the begining. 

حقوق المرأة هي حقوق الإنسان!

[Barb Binder]

Hi @PIET444:

An InDesign paragraph can have formatting applied (i.e., a para style set right to left) but a character style or inline formatting can override it. Select the characters that are backwards (and the spaces on either side) and remove any character styles and overrides and see if that takes care of it. Remove any overrides from the paragraph style as well.

~Barb

[charley_2045]

I've had this exact same problem, messad around with overrides, you name it - NOTHING works. I am absolutely at the end of my rope - is there a way of looking pu character order and changing it? Is there a name for the rule you have to apply in paragraph styles or whatever?

[Joel Cherney]

The instructions in this thread will work for you, once you've followed the instructions that Abhishek posted in your other thread. That is, you have to go into your Creative Cloud app and set your language to English (Arabic) or English (Hebrew) to install the version of InDesign that has right-to-left tools. 

[Joel Cherney]

I am trying to paste a line in arabic from a word document into indesign. In the word document it is aligned correctly right to left.

If you File -> Place the Word doc, it usually comes in with Right-to-Left paragraph direction. If you're pasting, then you're either using the formatting in InDesign and getting only raw text from Word, or you're trusting the clipboard to carry your formatting across from document to document. 

All it does is that it aligns it to the left or right. But the order of digits is still back to front.

You're clicking on this button, correct?

There are some other settings that affect character direction, such as the Language. Is it marked as English? Also, you can look at the actual character direction; in this case, it's "Default" which basically means "Respect the language setting; flow anything marked as English LTR and anything marked as Arabic RTL":

[PIET444]

Thank you so much. Today I started with a fresh doc and it worked. No idea what the issue was in the end but I appreciate all of you peoples input. 

[charley_2045]

Yes to both. Unfortunately, I was still unable to turn the pasted text around. I'm guessing you need to highlight that, create a new paragraph style and code it in to read from right to left as part of the instructions, maybe? 
Fortunately, the text I was copying and pasting came from another InDesign document, so I copied and pasted the (already formatted) text boxes from the original source and reformatted the text to fit the desired style. It would have been useful to know how to reorder text, for future reference, but in this instance it turned out to be merely a case of bodging the operation. 

I appreciate your help, though, and apologies for the late reply.