Fonts - particularly Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)

Oct 12, 2023

Can anyone offer a suggestion how to fix an issue I am seeing where I paste a Chinese phrase, as plain text replacing the English version, and sometimes it will appear bold and other times it does not?

I have tried different fonts and made sure they are native to my computer as well.

I attached an example, showing how it is showing (this does reflect in preview too) as well as the source Word appearance.

10 Replies
Judy Nollet

That happens when the designated font doesn't include the special characters used in Chinese.

The solution is to switch to a font that includes all of the characters for that language. For example, try switching to Arial, which I believe is supposed to work. Otherwise, do some research to locate an appropriate font. 

Yes, that means the Chinese version of a course won't have the same font as the English version. But who will care? It's better to have the Chinese characters appear consistent.

Scott Robson

Sadly, I've tried using the font my teams in China and Taiwan have sent me the translation in, PMingLiU, among others and that made no difference to the bolding. - still the same appearance, overall.  In some cases, the same characters will appear in one line, in bold, in others, not.  It is generally an entire sentence rather than just a character or two - sometimes it is part of a sentence.  The same thing happens in Arial - which is what I generally use.

In Word it looks fine, PPT too, just not in StoryLine.

Jürgen Schoenemeyer

in your example the

  • question is formated in "Open Sans" -> result on publish "SimSun" (traditional chinese)
  • answer 1 ist formated in "Nota Sans" -> result on publish "MS PGothic" (japanese)
  • answer 2, 3, 4 are formated in "Open Sans" -> result on publish "SimSun" (traditional chinese)

"Open Sans" and "Noto Sans" do not contain chinese or japanese letters, so substitute fonts are used

tries with*

  • Noto Sans SC (simplified) -> on publish -> storyline crashes without error message
  • Noto Sans TC (traditional) -> on publish -> storyline crashes without error message
  • Noto Sans JP (japan) -> ok -> Review 360
  • SimSun -> on publish -> ok -> Review 360
  • MS PGothic -> on publish -> ok -> Review 360

* all text new formated (click in every text box, control-a, then set the font)

Scott Robson

Thanks - I had installed the Noto Sans SC and TC like you had said but they didn't come up in Story line for me.

I had done answer one in the Noto Sans just to see if it would work, but as you saw, being a substitute, it didn't.

Not sure why SimSum didn't work for me before, I had tried that...  fun times.

Thanks again!