Un-American characters (was: Accented Characters on PlAtf0rMs?)

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 eric engle <engleerica at yahoo.com> wrote

> In MetaCard 2.2 when I tried to port a stack written
> in French from MacOS to Windows all my accents were
> changed.
>
> Since English has no accents this is not a problem -
> in English.
>
> However every other major language that I know of has
> accents. (French, Russian, Spanish, Italian... the
> list is not insignificant).
>
> I am wondering if there has emerged any workaround for
> this problem?
>
(snip)

I have run into a related problem:

The special German characters for a, o, and u with dots on top of them -
the so-called "Umlaute" - are preserved in texts and as names of objects
when the stacks are transferred from the Mac platform to Windows (of
course we have learned that you should not behave in an un-American way
when defining variables, which is a different matter).
However,  special characters as part of *custom properties* are
substituted by other characters when the stacks are tranferred from Mac
to Windows, which led to errors in a language program where we had
stored the meaning of images and its translation as custom variables. It
took us some time to find out that the problem was with the custom
properties.

So I also ask, is there a workaround for this problem?

Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke