Unicode

[Thomas McGrath III]

Pamela,

Thanks for the sympathy, I have not yet come up with a workable 
solution either. I have decided to try a similar approach on the Mac 
that you describe with using markers in my english text pointing to the 
chinese/asian which I can then keep as just chinese instead of being 
mixed. I also think that filter doesn't work so I will have to rewrite 
using a find structure. I haven't tested my stuff on windows yet since 
I couldn't even get it to work on the Mac.

Please keep me informed to what you discover.

Thank you

Tom

On May 9, 2005, at 10:44 PM, pkc wrote:

> Many thanks to Devin for his wonderful site. I am still hung up on a 
> problem very closely related to Thomas McGrath's, however.  Like him, 
> I am working on a project that calls for mixing Asian (in my case, 
> Chinese) characters with English text.  Both the English and the 
> Chinese elements are fixed, so I hit on the strategy of downloading 
> the English text as an English text with markers for Chinese 
> characters, then getting the client to feed characters from the 
> Chinese text into the English text; then the client identifies the 
> imported elements through reference to the list they came from and 
> setting the textFont of the foundChunk to ",chinese."
>
> This works extremely well on my machine (OS X). In fact, it works 
> perfectly. However, nobody using it on a Windows machine gets the 
> right characters (they get about 40% correct characters and the rest 
> is junk).  this is very perplexing, since the whole point of Unicode 
> is supposed to be that the characters are unique and will render 
> correctly in either Mac or Windows. But they don't.
>
> One thing I discovered in experimentation was that if I moved a 
> Chinese file line by line into a new field I could get the same junk 
> that Windows users are getting (the boxes --light or dark-- and random 
> character elements in a meaningless string). (this was not a paste, 
> which reproduces the textFont perfectly, as previously noted). It 
> seemed to me that I was transferring not only the characters but also 
> carriage-returns (is this possible??).  When I manually removed the 
> spaces between characters, everything straightened up.  The problem 
> was that I was left with a field that the computer thinks has one 
> character in it.  That won't work with my strategy --all the 
> characters will go into the marker for the first character.
>
> I think that could have been a blind alley, and now I am interested in 
> the idea that Mac and Windows systems reverse the placement of the 
> null character when dealing with UTF-16.  That could be why Windows 
> users are picking up the carriage returns and Mac users are not. The 
> problem is I don't see a way in Revolution to tell the computer to put 
> the null characters where WIndows expects it to be. Oh, one thing I 
> just thought of experimenting with... I have so far been making the 
> editing software remove all empty spaces (they produce those weird 
> cross things in Unicode). But maybe it would be healthier to make sure 
> the empty spaces are there, in order to keep the character returns out 
> of the WIndows character renderings?  No idea, will experiment and see 
> if the results are any better.
>
> If there is no Revolution trick that will fix this, I would like to 
> know if there is a setting Windows users can use to get their Unicode 
> to work the way Mac works.
>
> A bit frustrating. I have the basis for a research portal that works 
> very pleasantly on the Mac and looks insane on Windows.  Despite it 
> all being in Unicode!
>
> I'm still reading and still experimenting, but have sort of plateaued 
> here.  Quite a while since I had a breakthrough.
>
> Anyway, Tom, I sympathize.
>
> Pamela Crossley
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>

Thomas J. McGrath III
SCS
1000 Killarney Dr.
Pittsburgh, PA 15234
412-885-8541