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_a...@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. >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> use-livecode mailing list >> use-livecode@lists.runrev.com >> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription >> preferences: >> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode > > Devin Asay > Office of Digital Humanities > Brigham Young University > > > _______________________________________________ > use-livecode mailing list > use-livecode@lists.runrev.com > Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription > preferences: > http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
