Arabic letters have different forms (initial, medial, final, or isolated), depending on where they are located in a word. In a SAS session that is running with Arabic encoding, Arabic letters are written only in the isolated form in SAS Output Delivery System (ODS) output to PDF. As a result, Arabic words appear to have disconnected letters with unnecessary spacing in between them.

Here is an example of output with disconnected letters:

Here is an example of correct output with connected letters:

This issue occurs only for the PDF output. It does not occur in other ODS output types.

Click the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

After applying the hot fix, you need to use an ODS style with a font that supports the different Arabic letter forms (initial, medial, final, or isolated). Here are examples of supported fonts:

Windows Operating Systems

• Arial
• Times New Roman

Other Operating Systems

• Albany AMT
• Cumberland AMT
• Thorndale AMT
• Arial Unicode MS
• Times New Roman Uni

Here is example code that creates and uses a new ODS style to ensure that the PDF output contains connected Arabic letters:

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for Base SAS 9.4_M4 is available at: