The ISPF Workstation Agent does not perform any transformations on the contents of files that are transferred to or from the host in text mode. The implications of this depend on how the files are edited on the workstation. If your host files contain Arabic or Hebrew text, consider these points before editing them on the workstation:

• Host data is stored in Visual form. If you download a file to the workstation and edit it with an editor that expects the file contents to be in implicit form, the file can become corrupted.
• On Arabic Windows, the contents of a data file can become corrupted if the file is downloaded to the workstation then uploaded back to the host. This is because the host Arabic code page (420) supports shaped characters, while the Windows Arabic code page (1256) does not. Therefore, it is possible to lose shaping during the file transfer process.