On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:22:39 +0100 Nick Lamb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 11:04 -0300, John Coppens wrote: > > The origin of the strange characters in the file still unclear. These > > xls files are sent to my wife's pharmacy monthly with updates. > > It would be interesting to know some things if you have access to MS > Excel on Windows or Mac or to the (zero cost) Microsoft Excel viewer > program on Windows and time to experiment. > > * Do these characters appear visually to be the same in Excel as in > Gnumeric when you load the file ? I get the impression from previous > emails that the answer is "No", but I'm not quite clear. Hi Nick. I don't usually use Windows, and I don't have Office. But my notebook came with W$ preinstalled, and I just left it enough space for experiments. I downloaded and installed Excel viewer. Yes, the characters are the same. Which confirms my theory that the characters were imported from DOS (OEM charset) without conversion. > * If you re-save the Excel file (perhaps slightly alter the text in one > cell to make sure you're really saving a new file) from Excel does it > make a difference to the strange characters when imported into > Gnumeric ? Can't do that here, but I'll try at the university this evening. > The former would tell us whether Excel itself can figure out what's > going on here and get the right characters (in which case Gnumeric can > probably learn how to do the same) and the latter would tell us whether > perhaps the file sent to the pharmacy is non-standard in some way while > the same data when saved by Excel itself can be read correctly. I just believe some export or import filter used to generate the xls file ignored the OEM_850 (or whatever) coding and considered them Windows charset (Latin). > Might you be able to make (a copy of) the file available to one of the > developers to look into further? Not a problem. Who should I send it to? I'll add comments with offsets of where the strings are. Thanks, John _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list gnumeric-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
