Arabic Locale Support in Flex

Today, I learn how to localize my Flex application and to support multiple languages. The tutorials on-line are great. However, non of them mention the Arabic locale.

So basically, I created the Arabic (Jordan) locale files in the SDK folder by using:

copylocale en_US ar_JO

I navigated to the locale folder and I was able to see the ar_JO folder in there... So I assume everything went smooth.

Next, I followed the tutorials (www.babelfx.org) and was able to localize my test application in English, French, and Arabic. Clicking on any of those languages switches the labels of my simple form/into the desired language... however:

1. When switching to the Arabic language the labels turn into empty square symbols. If you are wondering, yes I can open a notepad and type Arabic text and save it successfully.
2. When I type Arabic text into the text boxes, I can see the Arabic words that I typed correctly (the labels are still square symbols).

Any ideas what I might be missing here??

I tried changing the font of my application (right on the application tag I set the fontFamily) into Simplified Arabic which comes by default on Windows.

Thanks

Have you embedded a font into your swf which can render Arabic? Are you using that font? If the answer is no to either, then I suggest reading up on the subject.

One thing to remember about Flash and fonts is that it has incredible power which comes from the fact that one is able to embed actual fonts into the swf itself. One also needs to remember that Flash is incredibly finicky and is prone to throwing fits if you fail to do so.

The solution is to change the context-type to UTF-8. Three ways to accomplish this from within Flex Builder:

(Option 1) Right click the file from the File Navigator and select Properties
(Option 2) With the file open, navigate to the File menu and choose Properties
(Option 3) With the file open, press Alt + Enter to bring up the file Properties

Once the properties window is displayed, you will see the option to change the file encoding from Default to Other (UTF-8).

Note: At least for me, once I changed the content-type to UTF-8, I had to close my unsaved file, open it back up, and paste my contents back into the file in order to clear the error message. Then clean the project (Project -> Clean...) and let it rebuild.

I found the solution. Actually, I didn't have to embed any fonts or anything in order to get it working.

My problem was the encoding in the resources.properties file. I opened it in Notepad++, then I noticed the Encoding menu. At that time, I remembered reading something about that the encoding of the resources files should be UTF-8. So I converted the encoding to UTF-8 from the menu, compiled, it didn't work! After couple of retries and cleaning the project, it worked successfully!!!

Just a reminder for everybody (as I have fallen into this while working this problem out): For mx components, embedded fonts must have the embedAsCFF set to false.