Reading former documents written by Open Office 1.1 or Word 2000 including
arabic sections do not display arabic correctly but only blank characters. The
problem occurs only on Linux (Mandrake LE 2005)

If you select the arabic text (it is blank but you know where it is and you can
select it) and change the fonts to an Arabic font, like Ae_AlArabya, then it is
displayed correctly but with this latter font. If the original font was Courrier
or whatever non Arabic font it won't display. 

I first thought that it was a problem between Windows and Linux fonts, but I
have no problem with former Open Office 1.1 on Linux: text even written in
Courrier but including arabic characters (I presume UTF-8 codes) are displayed
correctly.

In fact on Linux, if you open a new Document with Ooffice 2.0 beta and switch
your keyboard to Arabic, you can't see what you type if you use a Courrier font.
If you use Lucida Sans then it works (and probably because Lucida Sans includes
Arabic characters and glyphs) and Courrier doesn't. But why does it work on
OpenOffice 1.1.4 on Linux? How is the substitution done?

It is probably a basic question but I haven't find the answer yet.

PS: If you set your Language environment to Arabe (Tunisie) or (Liban) then the
the display of the Money is wrong blank characters for Arabic characters and
parentheses are inverted )Liban( instead of (Liban), this is probably a .po typo
only.