Overview of Finding and Replacing Characters in Indic, Southeast Asian, and Right-to-Left Languages

Overview

Finding and replacing characters or words in Indic, Southeast Asian, and right-to-left languages in Microsoft Office products presents special challenges because of contextual shaping, word-breaking rules, and the use of diacritical marks in many of these languages. Some search features in Microsoft Office do not work with some languages. Find-and-replace features search text in the order in which the text is entered, rather than the order in which it is displayed. Therefore, one can search for strings of right-to-left text, regardless of the direction of the paragraph.