Standard Adobe Illustrator is built primarily for left-to-right (LTR) languages. When a designer attempted to type Arabic script into a standard text box, chaos ensued.

Microsoft Word handles RTL differently. If you paste from Word, use "Paste without formatting" (Ctrl+Shift+V). Otherwise, you might import invisible control characters that mess up the Kashida.

Note: If you do not see these options, you may need to use the Adobe Creative Cloud Cleaner and reinstall choosing "Middle Eastern" as your language preference during install.

Not all Arabic fonts are created equal. Many free fonts lack proper glyph tables. The ME version works best with Adobe's native Arabic fonts (Adobe Arabic, Myriad Arabic, Helvetica Now Arabic) or professional fonts like Tahoma, Arial (Unicode), and Geeza Pro.

The ME version allows designers to set the direction of text at a character level. You can have an English word inside an Arabic sentence, and the software will automatically flip the logical order so the English word reads correctly within the RTL flow. This is accessible via a simple "Left-to-Right" or "Right-to-Left" button in the paragraph toolbar.

Western design uses spaces to justify text (Left/Center/Right align). Arabic uses —the elongation of specific strokes. The ME version allows you to justify text by stretching these characters, creating much more elegant paragraph blocks without awkward gaps.

Historically, Adobe released two distinct versions of its Creative Suite: the "Standard" Western version and the "Middle Eastern" version. The standard version treats text as Left-to-Right (LTR). When you paste Arabic text into the standard version, the letters break apart (losing their cursive connectivity), they read backwards, and the diacritics (Harakat) float incorrectly.

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The flagship feature is the Paragraph Composer. The ME version includes a "World-Ready Single-line Composer" and a "World-Ready Paragraph Composer." These engines understand the calligraphic nature of Middle Eastern scripts.