Un-American characters (was: Accented Characters on PlAtf0rMs?)

[Klaus Major]

Hi Wilhelm,

> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 eric engle <engleerica at yahoo.com> wrote
>
>> In MetaCard 2.2 when I tried to port a stack written
>> in French from MacOS to Windows all my accents were
>> changed.
>>
>> Since English has no accents this is not a problem -
>> in English.
>>
>> However every other major language that I know of has
>> accents. (French, Russian, Spanish, Italian... the
>> list is not insignificant).
>> I am wondering if there has emerged any workaround for
>> this problem?
>>
> I have run into a related problem:
> The special German characters for a, o, and u with dots on top of them 
> -
> the so-called "Umlaute" - are preserved in texts and as names of 
> objects
> when the stacks are transferred from the Mac platform to Windows (of
> course we have learned that you should not behave in an un-American way
> when defining variables, which is a different matter).
> However,  special characters as part of *custom properties* are
> substituted by other characters when the stacks are tranferred from Mac
> to Windows, which led to errors in a language program where we had
> stored the meaning of images and its translation as custom variables. 
> It
> took us some time to find out that the problem was with the custom
> properties.
> So I also ask, is there a workaround for this problem?
>
> Regards,
> Wilhelm Sanke

as Jaqueline pointed out, that will have to be scripted.

I asked Scott Raney about this problem some time ago and his
answer was quite clear and logical :-)

Custom properties can hold binary values ! and it would be not
desirable to have these automatically converted by MC 
(isotomac/mactoiso) ;-)

Therefore only text in fields and buttons etc. are handled 
automatically when
transferring stacks to another platform.


Regards


Klaus Major
klaus.major at metascape.org