bignum unicode entities in htmlText?

[Devin Asay]

On Jun 12, 2009, at 2:31 PM, viktoras d. wrote:

> sorry if I missed a possible hint in any of the previous threads on
> unicode. I am having trouble making Revolution correctly display  
> bignum
> unicode entities like unicode characters of Mandarin Chinese. In mysql
> database all the unicode strings are encoded with leading ampersand  
> and
> trailing semicolon like this: 西方黃黝魚
> These get correctly rendered in any web browser, but Revolution  
> fails to
> display them correctly in a field (I am seting htmltext of field).
>
> Is there any way to fix this?

Viktoras,

I'm jumping in here late, but wanted to add, when you save your  
HTMLtext with Chinese characters, you need to make sure than all of  
the font tags are saved with it. It seems that when you're using  
Unicode embedded in HTML you also have to tell Rev exactly what font  
and language to use to display it. It ends up coming out something  
like this:

<p><font face="Kai" size="16" lang="zh- 
CN">您离开讲国</font></p>

The font face attribute will of course determine the exact font,  
therefore the look of the characters. Make sure it's a font that you  
can reasonably assume will be on the target computer. The font lang  
attribute determines which variant of Chinese you use, Simplified  
(mainland) or Traditional (Taiwan primarily). For Simplified use  
lang="zh-CN". For Traditional use lang="zh-TW". Note that Simplified  
and Traditional Chinese fonts are not interchangeable. There are  
Traditional font faces and Simplified font faces.

By the way, here's how to get a list of Simplified vs. Traditional  
fonts on your computer:

    put the fontNames into tfonts
    repeat for each line tFont in tfonts
       if the fontLanguage of tFont is "SimpleChinese" then
       -- or use this test to find Trad.
       -- if the fontLanguage of tFont is "Chinese" then
          put tFont & cr after tList
       end if
    end repeat

Having said all that, it might be better in the long run to store your  
Chinese text in your database as UTF-8. To do so, just put your  
unicode text into a variable and upload it to a database:

   put unidecode(the unicodeText of fld "MyUniFld","UTF8") into myVar
   ## store the contents of myVar in the database

Then when you are retrieving it, you reverse the process. (You have to  
make sure that the textFont for the destination field is set to a  
unicode-compatible font first. Usually if you just put it back into  
the field you got it from it's fine.)

   set the unicodeText of fld "myUniFld" to  
uniencode(myDataFromDB,"UTF8")

As I've said before, Unicode and Rev play together fairly nicely if  
you understand some basic concepts and know Rev's quirks. See my  
article at http://revolution.byu.edu/unicode/unicodeInRev.php for more  
details.

Regards,

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University