OT-ish warning: Apple is still using Mac Roman

[Graham Samuel]

I'm using LC 6.5.1 on a Mac with Mavericks. Recently I was given a Pages document with some text I needed to paste into a LiveCode desktop app. The relevant text was:

3*(-1*x^2 + 4)(-1*x^4 - 5x + 2)

(Don't worry, it's just a meaningless example).

I changed this to plain text (it had originally been coloured and I thought this might affect the result). I then used an LC script to search for some characters, particularly the minus signs. Couldn't find them. Then I realised that I had to put the text string through LC's MactoISO function - so Pages, far from using UniCode (I thought everybody was doing it) is still using the old Mac character set. LC, even on a Mac, apparently isn't. The thing is, the pasted text **looks** OK in an LC field, but it's not.

Just a gotcha that surprised me and may bite someone else.

I'm wondering if LC 7 will take this kind of problem away. I'm also wondering what Apple are up to still using a proprietary character code. And I'm wondering if I should have tried to do the whole thing with Unicode text.

Graham