Output Error when Pasting Right-to-Left Text

Leonard works with documents that contain both English and Hebrew. When printing English and Hebrew names that he has typed in their entirely, all the names appear in the correct order: L-to-R and R-to-L, respectively. Occasionally, when he pastes a Hebrew name in the document, the order of the characters in the pasted name looks right on the screen, but is disturbed in the printed output. Leonard wonders how this error be recognized and prevented before printing.

Mixing L-to-R and R-to-L in the same document can, at times, be confusing. No doubt Leonard has been doing this long enough that most of the confusion is gone, but there are still times that can throw a wrench into the best intentions.

I've worked with documents in which there are Hebrew characters, and I've worked with documents produced by others that include Hebrew. In my experience, there are two ways that authors approach the Hebrew. Some authors select the Hebrew characters and then click the Right-to-Left button on the ribbon. Some other authors, though, manually reverse the characters in the Hebrew word(s). In other words, the Hebrew is still L-to-R, but the words have been typed in reverse sequence.

If you copy and paste information, the result should match whatever was in the source document, provided you don't paste "text only." (The text direction is considered part of the formatting, and pasting without the formatting could mess up the handling of the R-to-L text in what is being pasted.) It is a good idea, after pasting, to place the insertion point in the middle of any R-to-L text that was pasted and check the text direction buttons (Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left) on the ribbon to see how Word is handling that word.

In all cases, though, what you see on your printout should match what you see on the screen. If it doesn't, then it may help to make sure your printer driver is up-to-date and that what you are printing uses fonts that you actually have on your system. (Font substitution can manifest itself in some rather odd ways at times.)

For more information on working with R-to-L languages, the following Microsoft article may be helpful:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/17d8a34d-36d6-49ad-b765-257cb7cd22e2

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