OT-ish warning: Apple is still using Mac Roman

[Devin Asay]

On Jan 29, 2014, at 3:40 PM, Graham Samuel wrote:

> More issues - the minus signs don't seem to be Mac Roman after all (at least MacToISO no longer seems to translate the although I could have sworn it did earlier, nor ASCII, nor anything else I've found so far. LC's charToNum function thinks their value is 208 (decimal). Still looking…

It's an en dash, probably, rather than a hyphen. That's at code point 208 in Mac Roman.

Devin

> 
> On 29 Jan 2014, at 22:40, I wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University