Chinese Unicode problem

Friedrich F. Grohmann shedrup at ms9.hinet.net
Mon Jun 7 03:11:34 EDT 2004


Frédéric,

I've been struggling for a couple of months with Revolution and Asian 
scripts. Obviously, the earlier Macintosh operation systems and HyperCard 
have spoiled me pretty much so that I have a hard time finding my way 
through all the marvels of OS X and Unicode and what not.

Nevertheless, I managed to put a program together for one course I gave 
this semester, practically everything in Chinese, and the result does not 
seem too bad, at least in my eyes, though I've lost count on how many 
times Revolution crashed on me. One of the worst drawbacks is that 
automatic line wrap does not work for Chinese. If you are dealing with 
large amounts of two-byte text and not some lonely characters here and 
there, you are going to waste a lot of time just fitting text into fields.

I've written a very simple stack in order to import Chinese text from 
system 9 files so that one can work with in Rev under OS X. The method is 
primitive -I'm a philologist, not a professional scripter, and was under 
too heavy time constrains to develop something more sophisticated- but it 
works. Let me know if you want me to send you a copy.

O yes, I should not forget to mention that one of the wonders of working 
with Chinese under these conditions is that some characters can not be 
"translated" and end up as something which looks like a line brake and is 
going to crash Revolution if you are not careful. I've identified four or 
five culprits so far, by no means uncommon characters. 

Cordialement,

Fritz



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