While working with multilingual SharePoint site I came across a strange problem. The arabic characters or any non english characters which I entered in dataform webparts appeared as garbled. There were strange characters when viewing the page in browser but it looked absolutely fine in SharePoint designer.
We developers sometimes are careless about basic things which should be taken care of. What I did was just dragged the dataform webpart on the page without adding the web part zone on the page. I added the web part zone and moved the webpart in the zone. Bingo! things worked smoothly. The page worked like a breeze showing the arabic text.
I don't know why SharePoint did not recognize the Unicode characters (in my case arabic) directly on the page. Why it require the web part zone to function correctly? I am still searching for the reason.
Would love to hear from you people about this issue and what could be the exact reason behind the issue.
