Diacritical marks in various programs

[ptram]

Hi,

After transferring a text file from Linux (JDarkRoom) to Mac, I could notice some differences in reading diacritical marks in various text editors/wordprocessors on the Mac. The sentence

Questo testo è più che altro una prova

is read correctly by Nisus Writer, NeoOffice Writer, Bean, TextWrangler, Scrivener, but not by TextEdit and Mellel, that read it this way:

Questo testo è più che altro una prova

What can cause this difference, and the resulting problem in Mellel?

Best,
Paolo

[nicka]

Scrivener and TextEdit use the same text engine, so it is very odd that they behave differently. I would guess this is a font-related problem. What happens if you select the text in TextEdit or Mellel and apply a font that you have seen working in one of the other applications?

[Mart°n]

Aside from a simple font problem, it could also be a text encoding problem, so it would be helpful to know how you’ve transferred your text documents from linux to the mac. In which file format are the documents saved (RTF, TXT, DOC…)?

[signinstranger]

JDarkRoom is a plain text editor, so it's definitely an encoding problem. TextEdit can't open unicode text files correctly, unless you specify the encoding. The same thing happens with Mellel if you use "Open File" instead of "Import..."

[ptram]

Signinstranger,

Bingo! In Mellel, importing the text file generated by JDarkRoom, instead of loading it, let me choose the enconding. UTF-8 (Unicode) worked very well. also, choosing the right text encoding, when opening files, worked great in TextEdit.

So, it seems that some programs open files in UTF by default, or have a finer parser when opening plain text files.

Paolo