Edit, Copy, Clear, and Count Arabic Text Online

The typing box is a real editor, not a preview strip. You can go back into a sentence, fix a letter, paste Arabic in from elsewhere, and keep everything in one place until it is ready to leave. This page covers how it behaves once there is more than one word in it.

Finished text stays finished

The keyboard converts the word you are currently typing. As soon as you move on — a space, a click elsewhere, an arrow key — that word is committed, and it is never re-converted afterwards.

This matters more than it sounds:

• You can go back and edit. Put the cursor into a word you finished ten minutes ago, delete a letter, and only that word changes.
• Switching typing style does not rewrite your document. The Arabic already in the box stays exactly as it is; only what you type next follows the new style.
• Pasted Arabic is left alone. Text arriving from the clipboard is kept exactly as it came, so you can paste a paragraph from a message or a document and edit it here.

The practical rule: the keyboard only ever has an opinion about the word under your cursor.

Fixing a word without retyping it

Because the letters are ordinary text, ordinary editing works. Click into the word, use the arrow keys, backspace over the letter that came out wrong, and type the replacement.

The one thing to know is that the replacement re-enters as an active word. If you backspace into the middle of مرحبا and type H, you are typing Latin again at that point, and it converts as you go.

If a word has gone wrong in a way you cannot see, the usual causes are a capital letter or an apostrophe — common typing problems lists them with fixes.

The character and word counts

Beneath the box, a live count of characters and words.

What they measure, so you can rely on them:

• Characters counts every character in the box, spaces included. Diacritics are separate characters, so a vowelled word counts higher than the same word without its marks — which is correct, since they are separate characters in the text you will paste elsewhere.
• Words counts runs of text separated by spaces.

Both count the Arabic in the box — the finished text — not the Latin letters you pressed to get there.

That makes them useful for the ordinary reasons: staying inside a message limit, checking a card will fit, or seeing whether a paragraph is the length you promised.

Copy and Clear

Copy puts everything in the box on the clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. The button confirms when it has worked, which is worth watching for — a copy that silently fails is the sort of thing you only discover at the far end.

Clear empties the box. There is no undo for it, so if the text matters, copy it or save it first. If you have recent texts turned on, a cleared text can be restored from History — see favorites and history.

Working with mixed Arabic and Latin

Arabic runs right to left, and any Latin words or numbers inside it run left to right. Your browser handles that automatically, and the result is what a native reader expects — but it does mean the cursor can appear to jump when you click near a boundary between the two.

It is a display convention, not a corruption of the text. The characters are stored in the order you typed them, and they arrive in that order wherever you paste them.

Next step

Open the Arabic keyboard, type a short sentence, then click back into the middle of it and change a letter. Once the text is right, copying and sharing it covers getting it where it needs to go.