> On 21 Jul 2016, at 15:17, Abdassamad Clarke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> This is for Arabists and macro experts.
> 
> I have some Arabic text that has been prepared on MS Word on a PC. However, although the letters in the words flow from right to left, the words themselves work from left to right, e.g. using my first sentence:
> 
> "PC a on Word MS on prepared been has that text Arabic some have I.”
[...]

I have not been able to reproduce the problem you describe when opening any Arabic Word PC files with NWP. The oldest file I tried is from 1996.
Word 2011 on my Mac also displays the same Arabic files correctly; I have encountered the display problem you describe with a previous version of Word (2008?) on my Mac but never with NWE/NWP.

It may be that there are control characters used in the file (as was the case with legacy character encodings) which should no longer be there now that, in Unicode, directionality of the script is supported to give correct visual presentation.

I suggest you run (on a test copy of the file) this PowerFind Pro expression in the find field of the Find pane:

[\x{200E}\x{200F}\x{202A}-\x{202E}]+

Leave the Replace field empty; this will delete those superfluous characters.

Also, examine the style sheet of the file, and replace the character and paragraph styles with the corresponding styles that you normally use for Arabic.

Hamid