Issue with Special Characters in Course Title

Hi Lou,

If the published title of your Articulate Storyline course includes non-English characters, you may find that they display incorrectly in your LMS.

This is a known issue. To correct it, do the following:

1. After publishing your course, open the imsmanifest.xml file in a text editor, such as Notepad.
2. Search for all occurrences of a question mark (?), and replace each one with the correct character. (The title may occur more than once in the file. Be sure to correct each instance.)
3. Save and close the imsmanifest.xml file.
4. Zip the published output for your course with the modified imsmanifest.xml file.
5. Upload the zip file to your LMS for testing.

I have one similar question in quiz and survey. I have special characters (Chinese) in quiz answer and survey. It displays properly in the scorm course. However, we find that the answer in the response in interactions report with LMS(Moodle 3) appear as "Undefined". Is there any similar approach to correct this?

Hi TW,

This is something we've reported to our QA team, but we've also heard from a Moodle administrator in this thread that they're seeing it within Moodle (not specific to Articulate courses) so they're investigating it as well.  You may want to reach out to your Moodle team to see if they have any update but I'll also include this thread in the report filed with our QA team so that I can update you here once there is any additional information but unfortunately I cannot offer a time frame in regards to when I'll be able to share an update. 

Noted with thanks.

Hi Ashley,

We are facing the same issue with SL2. We have Portuguese characters in the course title and we edited the manifest file by following the steps you mentioned above. However, the SUMTOTAL LMS now is unable to parse the special characters. Do you know if this is an issue with SumTotal or SL2?

thank you

Kavitha

Hi Kavitha,

It's an issue with Storyline 2 that we're not encoding the character properly, which is why folks are able to edit and change them within the manifest file. If SumTotal is not able to read them from that file, you'll want to reach out to your LMS team or anyone in their support department to see if they're aware of that element and any ways around it.

We'll keep folks posted here on updates from our end, but in the meantime you'll want to look at editing that manifest file as shown.

Hi Kavitha, 

as we are having similar issues (special characters in Usernames and Scorm files produced with SL2) I stumbled upon this thread. 

We've already contacted the LMS Provider (Canvas) and we found that due to the character encoding some users can't access the scorm file and they can't do anything on their part to address this issue. 

After reading your reply I'm looking for clarification on the following questions

a).  is the issue of a faulty character encoding build in SL2 and

b). Articulate is aware of this fact and tries to get the LMS providers to fix the issue? 

I'm looking forward to your reply as this is not putting Articulate in a good light if so.

Hi Dietmar,

It's a combination - we have reported the issue to our QA team for additional investigation of the encoding we're doing as a part of publish, but a number of users did share that they were able to modify and edit it in the published output to achieve a successful upload to their LMS. In addition where heard of a few other LMSs who were experiencing difficulty with non-Articulate courses (I mention an issue with Moodle earlier in this discussion) and so it seems in the instances where the modification is made in the published output, the LMS may still not respect it. 

Either way - our team is still looking into what permanent fixes we can include, and you'll want to confirm with your LMS if there is additional work that would need to be done on their end to read those special characters. We'll keep you posted here once we have any additional updates, and I'd also recommend testing out the following fix to see how your LMS behaves with that:

1. After publishing your course, open the imsmanifest.xml file in a text editor, such as Notepad.
2. Search for all occurrences of a question mark (?), and replace each one with the correct character. (The title may occur more than once in the file. Be sure to correct each instance.)
3. Save and close the imsmanifest.xml file.
4. Zip the published output for your course with the modified imsmanifest.xml file.
5. Upload the zip file to your LMS for testing.

Hi,

We also facing the same issue in hindi language. So any updates on this issue.

If i try that mentioned steps font unicode issue pop up prompt appear, if click okay to save the manifest file is there anything will affect for SCORM functionality.

Thanks!

Hari

Hi Hari,

What version of Storyline are you using? This issue is something that's still present and our team is investigating. I'm really sorry that I don't have more info today but you're in the right place to stay updated on this bug's progress. 

Do you have an example/screenshot of the pop up you're seeing? I haven't seen that in the earlier reports of the bug, but let us know if you see anything off after selecting to proceed with that prompt. If you don't want to do that in your LMS, you could always look at using SCORM Cloud, it's a good standard to test LMS content. 

Hi Ashley, hi all, 

I am working on a course in Arabic language, so I use special characters (Arabic) for the title of the course.

I have solved the issue with question marks appearing in the title on the LMS, proceeding as you said (editing the imsmanifest.xml file). It worked fine.

But... I still have one issue... The title is still appearing with question marks in the browser tab (see picture attached). Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks a lot!

Coralie

Hi Ashley,

I am using Storyline 3 version with the latest updated 2 only. As per the above mentioned steps i follow the prompt appear, here enclosed the screen shot for your reference. but still the manifest file the question mark is not change to the hindi character i am not able to save the file after change the hindi text.

Thanks!

Regards,

Hari

Hi Coralie and Hari,

We do have this issue reported for Storyline 2 and Storyline 360, where the course title and slide titles include ? marks instead of the accented characters. This appears within the LMS reporting view - but the slides themselves look normal. I don't see mention of it appearing on the title in the browser though - so I'll share that with the team. 

Did you look at also correcting the title in index_lms_flash.html and index_lms_html5.html? 

What happens when you try to save the file, Hari?  

Hi Ashley,

I update the file with the hindi characters now the desktop version working fine, but mobile view launch page still the junk character appear.

Thanks!

Regards,

Hari

Hi Hari,

Can you tell me more about where you're seeing the junk characters on mobile? Do they appear in the Storyline player, or on the slide itself? 

Can you share a screenshot of what you see on mobile? Thanks!

Hi there,

We can confirm that the issue is very much still present in Storyline 3 & 360.

If the title of the course is in Greek then all the generated files when publishing for LMS (imsmanifest.xml, index_lms.html, index_lms_html5.html, index_lms_flash.html) have ???? instead of normal text values, although they are generated with UTF8 encoding.

The only exception are the story.html, story_flash.html, story_html5.html which have the title in Unicode Decimal Code values.

I am attaching an empty story file with Greek text and the generated publish for your reference.

Hi Simon,

Thanks for sharing the example courses here with me. I also uploaded it to SCORM Cloud to see how it looked, and yes the issue with the course title as it displays in the LMS and the browser window is still present in Storyline 3/360. You'll see my image of your course here - and that the title on the player and the text within the menu and slide(if there was text there) will show the correct characters and it's just the browser window showing all ?????. 

We do have this reported to our QA Team, and in the meantime I know other users shared that the workaround documented here resolves the issue in Storyline 360.

We'll keep you posted with any other information about this issue here in this forum discussion and I’m sorry if it’s slowing you down.

Good news, folks! We just released another update for Articulate 360, and it includes a fix for the problem where accented characters in titles were replaced by question marks in SCORM output.

Just launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer and click the Update button for each application. Details here.

Please let me know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.

Hello Alyssa, can this update be applied to Storyline3 as well?

Hi Yolanda,

Absolutely! We're targeting to release a fix for this bug in the next update of Storyline 3. As soon as the fix goes live, we'll let you know!

Hi Yolanda! I'm excited to let you know that we just released update 3 for Storyline 3! It includes new features and fixes - check them all out here.

One of the fixes addresses an issue where accented characters in titles were replaced by question marks in SCORM output.

Here’s where you can download and install the latest version of Storyline 3. Let me know how you make out!

Hi,

We are using Storyline 360, and we are facing special character issue in course title for iPad. We uploaded AICC packages to LMS.

Can you please suggest any solution.

Hello Nilima!

I'm happy to help! We released the fix in Storyline 360 (Build 3.48.24116.0) for the issue where accented letters and special characters were displayed as HTML-encoded strings on the start/resume screen in the modern player.

If you're still running into this, I'd recommend making sure you're using the latest version of Storyline 360. If you're already using Storyline 360 (Build 3.48.24116.0) and seeing the code in your course title, would you mind uploading your course to our team? Here's a secure upload link.