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World Tools is an InDesign plug-in for CS4 and later created to allow designers using InDesign to work on right-to-left languages and writing scripts – especially Arabic and Hebrew.

The CS5 and CS5.5 and CS6 versions of World Tools improves upon the success of World Tools in CS4, and we offer a panel as well as much tighter integration into the standard InDesign dialogs.

If you need to compose Chinese, Japanese or Korean text as well as right-to-left text, World Tools Pro is probably more suited to your needs.

Some advantages of World Tools over the ME version of InDesign are:

Price – you don’t need to buy a whole new program just for right-to-left or CJK composition.
Timely updates – historically, the ME updates took much longer to be released than the regular ones. For example: at the time World Tools was released for CS5, the current CS4 ME version was 6.0.2, while the US version was updated to 6.0.5. There were quite a few bug fixes since version 6.0.2 that ME users were not able to benefit from. There is no reason to assume the situation will be any better for CS5.
Use of right-to-left functions in the CJK versions of InDesign – The ME versions and CJK versions of InDesign are mutually exclusive.
Localized interfaces – World Tools can be used with any version of InDesign – no matter what the language of the user interface might be. The ME version only has English (IE), French, Hebrew, and Arabic interfaces.
Additional Functionality – World Tools also includes the following functionality not present in InDesign: Spread Numbering, a function to straighten existing quotes, and the ability to intelligently apply character styles to texts of different languages.