PPS: Arabic is a pain in the ass frankly, to write - each letter has up to FOUR versions, depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final, by itself) and depending on the letter, it can either connect to previous and next letter or JUST the previous, which means that the next letter has to use the INITIAL form even though it's in the middle of a word... BTW, this means that converting from UTF-8 to a non-smart terminal would require 28 x 4 (letters * positions) letters in a byte, plus maybe a control character to indicate that the text is to be printed right-to-left. Looking at the code pages on my Mac, it seems that several of these were in fact in existence back in the day, but the Arabic keyboard on OS X only input Unicode. Sampsa