How to Change Your PC to View and type Arabic Text



These are step-by-step instructions of how to get Arabic installed on your Windows XP and 2000, however some versions of windows needs an additional CD with the Arabic on it.

The following steps are based upon the Windows XP operating system, however, it works the same for Vista, and Windows 7. It may look different, but the tabs and what you must do is the same.



For you start off by going to the ‘control panel’ as seen on the picture below:





Choose the ‘Regional and Language Options’ option. Once there, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab at the top. Click that and it will take you to this screen:






Here is where you will select ‘Arabic (Saudi Arabia)’ from the drop down list and click all the squares that say the word ‘Arabic’ on it below. Scroll down the list and everywhere you see the word ‘Arabic’ click it.
Click ‘Ok’ or ‘Apply’ to install it. Once installed we need to configure the Arabic keyboard out. That can be found in the ‘Languages’ tab as seen on the picture below:







Once there you need to click on the ‘Details’ button. That should take you to the following screen:






The option in the middle is what you will see. You need to go to the ‘Add’ button to add a new language keyboard. Then the next box will appear, so select ‘Saudi Arabia’ from the ‘Input Languages’ drop-down list. And then choose either the ‘101’ version or the ‘102’.



Then press ‘Ok’. Once done you need to select a way to switch between languages, so click on the ‘Key Settings’ option, which should take you to the next screen shown below:






Then select how you want to switch between languages.

Now you’™re done. All that is left is to just use it. However, sometimes you might be using ‘Internet Explorer’ and all the Arabic comes out Greek, so what you do is you go to the ‘View’ options and choose list and then to the ‘Encoding’ selection and then to the ‘More’ sub-selection and then select ‘Arabic (Windows)’, as shown in the picture below.






This is the best I can do to help you all get Arabic on your windows. 

As for those who got stuck at the very beginning because they never found any reference to Arabic in the very beginning, then I found this website (http://zsigri.tripod.com/fontboard/arablpk.html) which claims to enable you to run Arabic by unzipping this file and following the instructions on the .txt file. I have not tried it and I would appreciate if it someone could verify that it works.