Un-American characters

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 Klaus Major <klaus.major at metascape.org> wrote:

> > 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,
> (snip)
> > So I also ask, is there a workaround for this problem?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Wilhelm Sanke
>
> as Jaqueline pointed out, that will have to be scripted.
>
> I asked Scott Raney about this problem some time ago and his
> answer was quite clear and logical  [:-)]
>
> Custom properties can hold binary values ! and it would be not
> desirable to have these automatically converted by MC
> (isotomac/mactoiso)  [;-)]
>
> Therefore only text in fields and buttons etc. are handled
> automatically when transferring stacks to another platform.
>
>
> Regards
>
>
> Klaus Major
>
Thanks for the feedback to both of you. I took a second look at this
matter: Special national (un-American or un-English) characters in
custom properties are *not* preserved both ways, from Mac to Win and
from Win to Mac. This holds even for the *names* of the custom
properties.

If this is designed to allow custom properties to contain binary data,
as a matter of fact the names of the custom properties need not be
effected, because only the contents of the custom property would contain
the binary data.

I still have troubles to fully understand this feature of attaching
binary data. Could you or anybody else give a practical example for
attaching binary data to a custom property and why such data need to be
located at this place?

On the other hand, could the problem not be the solution??
If binary data can be transported safely and unchanged across platform
borders, why not store - Metacard internally - custom properties and
their names as binary data? This would increase Metacard and Revolution
platform transferibility.

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke