Please help!!! Arabic encoding

[justry]

Hi everyone,



I've had this problem several times before: I have word 2003 with the 2007 compatibility pack installed. When I work on a .docx file in arabic, everything is fine initially, and I save the file. When I try to open it next time, the arabic text which I added shows up messed up (attached sample picture). I never found a solution for this and I just learned to save my files as .doc before I make changes to them.

Now my mom has this very important file that she'd been working on for a whole day, and when she tried to open it today, she was shocked to find ALL what she wrote yesterday had turned into this gibberish. Same thing: .docx file, was fine until she saved, closed and tried to open again. Only the text which SHE added was messed up, the rest of the arabic text that was originally in the .docx file before her editing is ok.

I tried opening it in word 2007, tried saving as rtf, tried saving as a web page and changing the encoding to all kinds of encoding, but still no avail, it looks like the actual arabic text was lost and these new strange characters were "baked" into the file!

How do I get the arabic text back? Pleeeeeease help or my mom's going to kill me!!

Note: when I try to copy some of the garbled text into notepad, save it as a txt file, and then try to open it in word, it asks me what encoding I want to use, and when I choose "Arabic (windows)", I can see the correct arabic characters but separated by spaces, s u c h a s t h i s..(but in arabic of course)...does that mean there's still hope??

Thanks in advance!

[justry]

Finally did it.....here's how:

Had to save the whole file as plain text (unicode), then opened it in word again, and when it asked me about encoding this time I chose arabic (windows). Now I had my text but it was broken into letters. The other paragraphs which were already displayed correctly were now messed up of course. I tried to do a find/replace to remove the extra spaces, but it didn't work. Apparently the spaces are not "regular" spaces, but rather another character with messed up encoding too. So I tried "copying" the space character into the find/replace dialog, but still no use. So anyway, I saved the file, and opened it in notepad, then I did a find/replace in notepad using the copied space character, and it worked!! I finally had my text!! All I had to do then was copy the involved paragraphs one by one back to my original document, which was the really annoying part, but it's done now thank God!!

That's it, I hope this experience would be useful to anyone who might have the same problem!