Fonts with Accents - Unpredictable Display

Apr 20, 2011

Hi - I'm having a font issue that I'm sure isn't new. We are developing a course in English that sometimes uses Chinese words using Roman characters with accents (similar to Spanish or French accents.) For example, guānxì  . All the words in PowerPoint display correctly, but when published in Articulate, one of the following happens:

  • The letter with the accent doesn't display at all. (This happens on Presenter slides.)
  • The letter with the accent switches to the SimSun font (installed on my computer), but this looks weird when embedded with the Helvetica font we are using. (This happens in Engage and Quizmaker - however the characters are displayed correctly in the Engage and Quizmaker player title - just the content gets corrupted).
  • The letters are switched to complete garbage. (This happens on Presenter slides.)

There are some other permutations of the above, but I won't get that detailed. I searched the Knowledge Base for font issues like this, but couldn't find anything. We have to keep English as the language, as there is no other language choice that is applicable. (Technically, the Roman letter display of Chinese words is referred to as PinYin, but there is no PinYin option.) Thanks!

10 Replies
Jennifer Bircher

Hi Brian, thanks for the suggestion, but the client does not want Arial in the course. If we need to change fonts for those words, we'll change them to SimSun, which does publish correctly. I was just hoping to avoid manually changing all instances of those words, but if that's the only solution, I'll do it.  Do you know if there's another solution (i.e. getting them to display properly all the time in the Helvetica Neue font?) Thanks!

Jennifer Bircher

Hi Brian - just a quick followup to this. I'm glad you mentioned the Arial Unicode MS. At first, we changed the text that has accents to SimSun, but it looked glaringly different. Changing those words to Arial Unicode MS looks almost seamless! The only hitch is in Quizmaker. For some reason, when a sentence has a word with an accent (in Arial Unicode MS), additional spacing is added above and below the line containing it. (See attached screenshot). I tried changing the entire paragraph to Arial Unicode MS, but the additional spacing is still there. I couldn't find a way in QM to adjust that spacing. Any ideas? Thanks!

Jennifer Bircher

Hi Brian,

I typed the text into a new blank slide, but I had to insert the Arial Unicode MS symbol for the accented letters. The spacing was fine until I entered a letter with an accent - it immediately jumped to the larger spacing. I even tried bumping down the font size of the accented letter, but spacing was still larger. However, this isn't a showstopper (99% of the words in the course look just fine)... but if you have any other thoughts, that would be great!

xavier inghilterra

Hi everybody,

I've got the same problem in Articulate when using "Fill in the blank" question ; I'm working on french applications which have lots of accents and everywhere there's accent in a word, the response is considered as wrong. Even when I use Arial Unicode MS font character, the problem still appears.

Who can help me ?


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