How to search for foreign languages

[FIL-101]

Hi,

I'm exporting a manuscript from ID to kindle Previewer.  After much work, everything is looking good but I seem to have fallen at the final hurdle.  When I try to export from Kindle previewer, creating the mobi file, I get the message "Export is not supported for Arabic and Indian language books."  I had a look at the metadata using Calibre and it showed a bunch of languages, arabic being one.  I checked my document in ID was in English:UK for all my paragraph styles.  All seems good there.  After trawling the forum I wondered if certain words or characters in the manuscript were being detected as arabic.  So my question is this.  Is there a way to search for individual words that ID sees as arabic?

ID version:                       ID CC 13.1

Operating system:          Mac OSX Sierra 10.12.6

E Reader:                       kindle previewer 3.24.0

Epub export:                   EPUB 3.0

Thanks in advance.

Phil

[FIL-101 · Accepted solution]

HOLD THE PHONE! - Found it.  Worked out how to search for Arabic (I was being an idiot) and low and behold a sentence popped up that although written in English, was being detected as Arabic.  Why? Who the hell knows.  With the offending line deleted and re-written the manuscript exports from Kindle previewer as expected.  <Sigh>

[Jongware]

That only raises more questions. What English phrase could be "detected as Arabic"? And by whom?

Also, does your Kindle have phone capabilities?

[Steve Werner]

Moving to InDesign EPUB forum

[FIL-101]

Indeed!  The sentence was a bog-standard one.  Speech, followed by a line of description.  Go figure?  With regard to the phone capabilities, the answer is no but I was testing by simulating a kindle paperwhite using Kindle previewer so I couldn't tell you what it was doing in the background.  

[Zaid Al Hilali]

May ne you applied Arabic dictionary to that one sentence by mistake!

[FIL-101]

If I did then I haven't a clue how I did that to just one sentence.  I'd been making only global changes to chapters in the ID book then copying paragraph and character styles across subsequent chapters.  If I mucked-up the dictionary I would have expected the error to propagate across the entire document. My money is on the conversion that the source material went through before bringing it into ID.  The original piece was written in Apple Pages then converted to a .docx format to bring into ID.  I'm guessing something went awry during that process.  Saying that, why did the conversion not effect the rest of the document?  I guess we'll never know.

[Laubender]

Worked out how to search for Arabic (I was being an idiot) and low and behold a sentence popped up that although written in English, was being detected as Arabic.  Why? Who the hell knows.

Hi Phil,

ah, you imported parts or all of your text from a Word docx document.

Could you quote the sentence where you found the wrong Arabic language formatting? Does it contain any accented characters? Perhaps formatted in Bold?

Regards,
Uwe

[FIL-101]

As said in my last post, it was a nothing sentence.

‘Yes sir,’ said the sergeant, as he and the men set about making camp for the night.

In the end I just deleted it and and didn't both re-wrting it or re-formating.  No bold or italics just a paragraph style of Adobe Garamond Pro with English:UK language applied. Yet when I looked closer, up came the Arabic language detection.  I've just checked back to an earlier version and found no errors from the Apple Pages / .docx conversion so the problem occurred after the who document was imported into ID. 

[lissaa62216526]

This post helped me figure out why my ePub was being rejeted because of multiple languages. There must have been characters throughout the text that were another language besides English USA. It likely came from the original Word document. I checked a few of my styles and they were set-up correctly so then I decided to select all of the text. It took me a minute to figure out where Language was but once I located it in the Character menu and saw that it was blank I began to select several paragraphs of text at a time until it went from English: USA to being empty under Language. The first culpret was the copyright symbol and some spaces. I selected all of the text for the book and changed it to English: USA and hopefully that will clear up the problem. I thought I would add my experience in case it helps someone else.