Corrupt RTF-files

[paieye]

I send a file consisting of a table of English words and their Arabic equivalents in the RTF-format as an attachment to an email-message. My correspondent makes corrections and completes blanks, and sends the file back to me, still in the RTF-format. The result is gibberish, as yo can see in the screenshot attached to this posting. Can anyone help ?

[paieye]

I ought to have made clear that the "gibberish"-column will have been in Arabic script. What puzzles me is that in the middle column, also in Arabic script, the red letters have been inserted by my correspondent into text prepared by me, without any loss of formatting.

[martin]

The problem with that gibberish text is almost certainly due to its font, and has nothing to do with RTF. I expect at least one of your fonts is an old pre-Unicode font from the "classic" Mac days of OS 9. That font probably uses non-standard text encodings. Your font might display an Arabic ن character on screen, but the underlying text really encodes the letter  or some other unrelated gibberish.

The short term solution is to send your colleague all the fonts you are using. That way the gibberish displays correctly on screen.

The long term solution is to remove all traces of this font from your document. It's very bad to still use these pre-Unicode fonts. You never want the meaning of the text in your document to be dependent on the fonts you're using. Unicode solves that. The letter ن is always the letter ن, no matter what font is applied.

Unfortunately it will take a good amount of work to fix this kind of old text. Please see our FAQ on opening Classic Nisus Writer documents. From there you will learn that you will need to create a map of each character used by your old font. You can enter this map as a customized macro that can transliterate your non-standard text.

I hope that helps, and good luck!

[paieye]

Thank you, most helpful !

[paieye]

Yes, you were absolutely right ! Many thanks again.