unicode in pre-beta

[Igor de Oliveira Couto]

Hi all,

> Tuviah wrote:
>
>>  I'm personally
>> look forward to feedback on Unicode,
>
> I was anxiously awaiting Unicode, but after playing with it for just a 
> few minutes, it doesn't seem to be working very well yet (Mac OS 
> 10.1.5, Jpnese kotoeri input).  You can now type and edit Japanese OK 
> in a single field, which is nice, but you cannot seem to move anything 
> from one field to another via script without it messing up (although 
> copy/paste works OK).  Moreover, if you want to delete or move a 
> single Jpnese 2 byte character, you must still treat it as two 
> characters (eg. delete character 1 to 2 of field 1 deletes just the 
> first Jpnese character).  This contrasts with Hypercard, which just 
> 'knows' whether a character is 2 byte or not (it's  beautiful thing).
> Also, the IDE has an annoying bug where if you accidently type some 
> Jpnese into the message box, you cannot simply delete and switch back 
> to English but must close and reopen the message box.  Hopefully that 
> will be gone in the real release.
>

I must also admit I've found the international character handling still 
quite unacceptable at this pre-beta stage. I have been working on an 
Esperanto stack, a language which uses characters such as c+circumflex 
(ĉ), g+circumflex (ĝ), and u+breve (ŭ) among others. All these have to 
be typed with the 'US Extended' keyboard layout in MacOS X (10.2).

I believe the problem is that a lot of the 'internal' text routines in 
Revolution are actually handled by scripts, and transcript does not 
seem to REALLY be able to handle Unicode. Try this: type a sentence 
which uses these 'funny' international characters which can only be 
typed with the US Extended keyboard. Then, in the text section of the 
inspector, try CHANGING THE CASE (to something like "Title Case"). You 
will notice that not only do your international characters disappear, 
but also that you will get UppeRcase letters right in the middle of 
your words - where the international characters once were...

No doubt, all of this will be fixed in future releases...

Kind Regards,
--
Igor
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igor at pixelmedia.com.au
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