Rutba Office in Arabic and Hindi, with Hijri dates and kashida

1.38 put Rutba Office into Urdu on 9 October. By the next day the suite also spoke Arabic and Hindi, and the releases in between added the details each language needs beyond its words.

The rest of the Urdu (1.39)

1.38 translated what the windows say. 1.39 translated what the engines say for themselves, about 310 messages: a wrong password, a file that will not open, a step a document cannot take. The engines still write them in English, for the logs and for anybody reading a report, and the window finds the translation as the message arrives, with the file names and numbers put back in. Citation styles, envelope sizes, label kinds, field descriptions and Power Query’s applied steps followed, each step written as its own sentence so the words fall in Urdu’s order.

Arabic (1.40)

The Language section of the app menu now offers العربية beside English and اردو. Every word is translated, about 5,350 messages, in Modern Standard Arabic using the terms Microsoft Office uses in Arabic. The frame turns right to left as Urdu’s does, while a document’s page, a worksheet’s grid and a slide keep their own direction.

• Six plural forms. Arabic counts differently for none, one, two, three to ten, eleven to ninety-nine and a hundred or more, and each count reads as Arabic says it.
• A choice of digits. An Arabic window uses Western digits by default, as Office in Arabic does, and a Digits setting switches to Arabic-Indic digits (١٢٣) in counts and dates alike. An Urdu window offers Urdu’s own digits (۱۲۳) the same way.
• Paper sizes stay in order in a right-to-left line, so A4 still reads 21 × 29.7 cm.

Hijri dates, and a Find that reads Arabic as people write it (1.41)

• Hijri dates in Worksheets. A number format can name the Hijri calendar the way Excel’s do, with B2 or a locale code, so [$-60401]d mmmm yyyy shows a date such as 29 ربيع الآخر 1448. Dates follow the Umm al-Qura calendar, so a file Excel dated by its older Kuwaiti reckoning can differ by a day.
• The Hijri calendar in Calendar, beside the Gregorian one: each day’s Hijri number in the month, week and day views, and the Hijri months in the title. It is on by default in an Arabic or Urdu window, and a button turns it either way.
• Find ignores the marks a word is written with, as Office in Arabic does: the vowel marks, the kashida and the different forms of alef and yeh. A search for كتب finds كَتَبَ, and احمد finds أحمد. A Match diacritics box finds a word only as it is written.

Hindi, and kashida in print (1.42.1)

Hindi arrived in 1.42, in standard Hindi in Devanagari, with numbers grouped as India groups them (12,34,567) and a choice of Devanagari digits (१२३). Unlike Urdu and Arabic, the frame stays left to right. 1.42.0 itself shipped without installers, because the Hindi language file in the installer builder was broken, so 1.42.1 followed with the same suite and working installers.

The same release brought kashida to Documents. Arabic text is justified by lengthening the joins between letters rather than widening the spaces, and Word offers three levels of it. Rutba Office keeps those settings in the file, offers them for a right-to-left paragraph, and draws the lengthened joins when the document is printed or saved as a PDF, only where two letters join and never inside lam-alef. On screen such a paragraph is still justified by its spaces, because the window’s text engine cannot stretch letters. Calendar’s week also now starts on the language’s own first day: Saturday in Arabic, Sunday in Urdu and Hindi, Monday in English.