Converting Arabic Forum

[AFUNA]

Hello all
am converting to SMF 1.1.9 from IPB 2.3.5
I got a little problem
The forum's original language is Arabic
so when am converting the IPB database collation is latin1_swedish_ci even the table of ipb_languages collation is latin1_swedish_ci
and when I convert to smf I found a bad result
that the forum's topics, posts, categories ... etc all went wrong to latin characters
How come !? even the Arabic appears correctly in IPB and as I said before even the table of ipb_languages collation is latin1_swedish_ci
to understand the problem properly I attached a picture to it.
[smf] is for using a different collation when converting in the convert page field "Set SMF's default character set to:"
[smf2] another different one
the question is now what are the perfect collations to all the databases (ipb & smf) and conversion option to make the forum appears normally without forcing members to change the page encoding ..
f.e to appear like the appearance in pic "ipb"
Thanks in advance ..
Best regards ..

[ThorstenE]

Sorry for the late responce.. Have you tried installing SMF with "UTF-8" and then convert your IPB? latin_swedish_ci and arabic isn't a good solution. Not sure, but I believe arabic should use "windows-1256" or UTF-8..

[GravuTrad]

any news?