very strange Set Language behavior

[Peter T. Daniels]

I just inserted the character "thorn" (the th-sound used in Old
English and Icelandic, like a combined b and p) via Insert Symbol, and
while I was at it gave it a Keyboard Shortcut.

The thorn displays a Set Language of Arabic (Saudi Arabia). The
Keyboard Shortcut doesn't work. (It appears as correctly "assigned" in
Insert Symbol.)

Selecting the character and changing its Set Language has no effect --
stepping past it rightward with the cursor even shows a right-to-left
movement for three characters (as if the marker for "change direction"
is included).

If it insisted on marking it Icelandic, that would at least make sense.

 

[Pesach Shelnitz]

Hi Peter,

You are not alone. In my testing, I observed a similar switch to
right-to-left without insertion of the character when I tried to use the
built-in Alt+0254 shortcut to insert a lower-case thorn in both Word 2007 and
Word 2003. Alt+0253 also caused the switch to right-to-left, but other nearby
numbers worked fine. I tried this in several fonts. However, I could insert
both the upper-case thorn (Unicode 00DE) and the lower-case thorn (Unicode
00FE) from the Symbol dialog box and by typing DE after a space and pressing
Alt+X and by typing FE after a space and pressing Alt+X, respectively,
without any language change. I also created a shortcut that works fine by
selecting the lower-csae thorn in the Symbol dialog box, clicking Shortcut
Key, and assigning Alt+5.

I also found that character inserted by Alt+0254 in Word is actually the
Right-to-Left character (Unicode 200F) and that Alt+0253 actually inserts the
Left-to-Right character (Unicode 200E). In Notepad Alt+0254 inserts the
lower-case thorn.

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

(Which means that Arabic (Saudi Arabia) is the default right-to-left
language.)

Wow, that's even more nefarious than Windows taking over the Word Ctrl-
Spacebar command from "clear formatting" to "switch to Chinese." At
least we understand why that happens.