OT-ish warning: Apple is still using Mac Roman

[Richmond]

On 29/01/14 23:40, Graham Samuel 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.

You can, save from Pages into Microsoft's ubiquitous .doc format.

My younger son, who stays in Germany and uses a MacBook, sent me a pages 
document in that format, I then opened it
on Linux with Libre Office, and everything came through clearly. So:

1. Pages works with the MacRoman standard and converts this to Unicode 
when it saves to .doc.

or

2. Libre Office on Linux opens any .doc document perfectly regardless of 
its character encoding.

or

3. Pages DOES encode in Unicode.

I wonder ????

> 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

Does Pages use MacRoman, or had you, by putting the text through LC's 
MactoISO function mucked it about?

>   - 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.

Unfortunately I'm at work where everything runs on Linux. However, when 
I get home this evening I shall dig out my macMini
(which has a licensed version of Pages running on it) and see what is 
going on.

This:

http://www.apple.com/mac/pages/compatibility/#text

is remarkably unhelpful as it is written for people who are interested 
in typing documents rather than transferring the end results
into happy little places such as an LC field. There is NO mention of 
|the U word" (Unicode).

Richmond.
>
> Graham
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