We recently came across an issue that a faculty member was having issues with students using Arabic in Microsoft Word on their Mac computers. When they type words, the characters do not connect like they should (each letter was separate). In our search to find out why this was happening, we found out that Microsoft Office no longer supports Arabic properly in their latest Mac version. We did find two open source word processors where the characters were not separated, AbiWord and NeoOffice. Both worked great but NeoOffice was able to open .docx files and AbiWord only opened .doc files. To check out the software (free and open source) click on the link below:
NeoOffice: http://www.neooffice.org
AbiWord: http://www.abisource.com/