Workaround for Arabic text

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Karela

I have embarked on a project with Arabic text before I realized that there is no RTL support for scribus yet.

Has anyone got any workarounds in the meantime? I used to work with Hebrew a lot back in the days of Freehand, and you could simply take your text from a word document, it would show up as a mirror image and you could reflect it. Later they even came up with mirror image fonts which made it even easier. I tried that out with Hebrew in Scribus, but it didn't work (each letter is printed properly, but the letter order in the word is LTR, so no possibility to reflect). Additionally, because Arabic is cursive, if I import from a word document it simply prints out individual letters that are not joined.

The booklet I am working on is for Arabic students and will mostly require single words or simple phrases- no large bodies of text. I am considering saving each word/phrase as an image and importing, but if anyone has quicker or more simple ideas I would love to hear them. Or if, by some miracle in the last few months this has been developed. (I would love to be of help, but I can't actually read Arabic!)

I need to use Scribus because it is a multi-page layout (looks like around 50 pages in total).