Russian (UTF-8) in LC 4.6

[Slava Paperno (Bridge)]

Hi Curt! It was good to hear from a colleague.

I'd known about your Sona cards, but I forgot (or never knew) that they were
done in LiveCode. But I went through the Web site and was quite impressed.
The site is well done, too. (I used it in Chrome, and everything looked
great.) Good job!

Thanks also for the reference to Devin Asay's article. It told me almost
everything I needed to know about Russian in LC 4.6. I do understand (and
sympathize with) the LC developers as they struggle with these issues and
introduce workarounds and fixes. It'll be quite a burden for them to keep
the system backward compatible as they move towards full and natural support
for Unicode.

As you probably know, I use the custom fonts we designed to show accented
vowels in all Russian texts in my software publications. Conversion from
accented text to unaccented text, from accented lower case to accented upper
case vowels, translating keystrokes to offer the Student keyboard layout,
normalizing strings for dictionary lookups and sorting, etc. is part of just
about every step in programming and using my publications. Variables,
arrays, property lists, and various loops are used everywhere. So when I saw
Devin's two-long-lines script that's needed just to assign a Russian word to
a field, and read about accessing a Russian character as a two-character
sequence, and also shipping them around as HTML entities, I had to scratch
my head.

I'll stay around this list and learn what I can about LiveCode this summer.

Gratefully,

Slava

> -----Original Message-----
> From: use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com [mailto:use-livecode-
> bounces at lists.runrev.com] On Behalf Of Curt Ford
> Sent: Sunday, May 08, 2011 6:56 AM
> To: use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Subject: Re: Russian (UTF-8) in LC 4.6
> 
> Hello Slava,
> 
> One of my projects worked pretty well with Russian, but it involved
> mostly typing in Russian, saving to a file as HTMLText, and later
> reading in that HTMLText for display in fields. The one place that
> involved manipulating the strings directly ('exploding' the words to
> display individual letters separately) was kind of a pain, especially
> in expressions that included a space or any punctuation. You can get a
> sense of what I was able to do at
> 
> http://www.sonasoftware.com/vocab/
> 
> I hope the real Unicode support comes before too long - this issue is
> one of the main reasons I've started working in ObjectiveC for some
> projects.
> 
> Just in case you haven't seen it, Devin Asay has a nice summary at
> 
> http://www.runrev.com/developers/lessons-and-
> tutorials/tutorials/unicode-in-revolution/
> 
> best
> 
> Curt