Arabic characters showing as question marks

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lp963
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Joined: Fri Dec 29, 2017 12:20 am

Arabic characters showing as question marks

Post by lp963 »

Hi,

I copied and pasted arabic characters into openoffice writer from a forum page during my online seminar, it is a lot of notes for my exam in a few days, the characters in arabic showed fine at the time. i saved the file and now when i open it all the arabic characters show as question marks. but the english characters show fine in english.

i downloaded the 3.4.1 language pack and changed the language settings to arabic in the tool>options>language settings - but neither has worked.

the file is attached.

i'd be really grateful for some help!
Attachments
notes.txt
(1.62 KiB) Downloaded 266 times
OpenOffice 4 on Windows
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RusselB
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Re: Arabic characters showing as question marks

Post by RusselB »

I suspect that you need the appropriate font file.
OpenOffice will perform silent font substitution if the proper font file is missing, but the file that OpenOffice uses, in these circumstances, may (or may not) have the appropriate characters.
As you state that you are getting question marks, I'm suspecting, in this case, that the substituted font file does not contain the appropriate characters.
OpenOffice 4.1.7, LibreOffice 7.0.1.2 on Windows 7 Pro, Ultimate & Windows 10 Home (2004)
If you believe your problem has been resolved, please go to your first post in this topic, click the Edit button and add [Solved] to the beginning of the Subject line.
jrkrideau
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Re: Arabic characters showing as question marks

Post by jrkrideau »

You may have an encoding problem. Ideally you would be working and saving in UTF-8 but for some reason the file may have been saved in another encoding. See viewtopic.php?f=9&t=91665 for what appears to be a case of this.

I switched to an Arabic (Morocco) keyboard and had no trouble saving a bit of text in both .odt and .txt using the Liberation Serif format in Linux.

I suspect that your material is lost.
LibreOffice 7.3.7. 2; Ubuntu 22.04
John_Ha
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Re: Arabic characters showing as question marks

Post by John_Ha »

You posted a .TXT file. .TXT files store only the characters - they do not store any font information.

Paste the content into OpenOffice Writer and save as a .odt file.
LO 6.4.4.2, Windows 10 Home 64 bit

See the Writer Guide, the Writer FAQ, the Writer Tutorials and Writer for students.

Remember: Always save your Writer files as .odt files. - see here for the many reasons why.
esperantisto
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Re: Arabic characters showing as question marks

Post by esperantisto »

lp963 wrote:…i saved the file…
Work only in the native format, i. e. in ODT, and export the results only after you have finished the work. This is exactly what might have resulted in data corruption: you saved the file as plain text with a wrong encoding. And now your data are lost.
AOO 4.2.0 (of 2015) / LO 7.x / Win 7 / openSUSE Linux Leap 15.4 (64-bit)
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