Arabic does not import text correctly

Aug 31, 2015

Hello everyone,

My company is getting ready for a project that translate into Arabic. I've set text boxes to RTL, export as DOC, and pasted sample Arabic text into Word. When importing the file back into Storyline 2, it displays as garbage characters, even though text boxes are set to display in RTL and using Arial font. Could you please help figure out why it behaves this way? I tested with Hebrew (the other RTL language) and it behaved the same! Though, it may worth to mention that copy and paste (unformatted) text work for both languages.

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

9 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Daisy, 

Have you enabled a right-to-left keyboard input language? Also have you tried different fonts, I know a lot of users have mentioned that Arial Unicode MS offers a good experience with Arabic or other RTL text. Are you only seeing a issue when importing in the translation document - what about when just entering the text directly into Storyline? 

daisy to

Hi Ashley,

Yes, my computer has the Arabic keyboard enabled; though I'm not typing Arabic so I don't think that would help. I have tried:

- Setting text box, with English text, with RTL direction, using Arial/Arial Unicode MS/Times New Roman, export into Word. Then in Word, I pasted unformatted Arabic text, making sure it still retains the original font type, and import back into Storyline. After it imports, the font changes to Calibri and text box direction goes back to LTR. Changing the font back to the original font after import doesn't work.

- Typing or copy/paste text into Storyline works, but that would not serve my purpose. The course is designed in English and copy/paste would cause an incredible hike in working hours. I'm reserving it as the last option.

 

Thank you for all your help,

Daisy

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Daisy,

Thanks for sharing that here. Your files caused the same behavior for me - but since it was easy enough to see what you were doing, I was able to test in a brand new file and I just used google translate to generate some random Arabic text to place in the word doc and import it. That one worked normally in that the standard English text was replaced by the Arabic text. I also tested just copying and pasting the arabic characters into your .story file and that changed them to a jumbled mess - so with that in mind, I'd want to confirm that you were working on local project files as described here. 

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Daisy,

Here is the word doc I imported in and how it appeared after translation - but since you're getting some inconsistent results, let's have you work directly with our Support team to figure out if there are any different steps you're going through than what we've done. 

Stephane Muller

Hi,

I'm having the exact same issue. It's the first time though, never had it before. Arabic letters are not working, be it by importing the doc file or by copy pasting...

Only the slide titles are displayed properly, but that's not helping.

What was the solution to that problem? I need to solve this issue asap!

Many thanks!
Stéphane

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