OT-ish warning: Apple is still using Mac Roman

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks Devin

Ha! So the person who wrote the text just **thought** they were minus signs. The trouble with the en dash (as opposed to the em dash - I used to set type by hand, so I remember these) is that the glyph in most fonts is very close to the minus sign. So maybe I haven't got a problem after all (or I can look for the various dashes and treat them as minuses, I suppose). By the way MacToISO(numToChar(208)) gives ñ in a LiveCode field or script (that's the 'n' in 'manaña' I guess). Anyway it does look as if I was right about Pages still using the Mac private character set for characters greater than Ascii 127. Hope so.

Thanks again

Graham


On 30 Jan 2014, at 00:01, Devin Asay <devin_asay at byu.edu> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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