Unable to paste CJK into Mellel

[rwg]

Since the latest Mellel update I have found that when copying text containing CJK from Scrivener and pasting it into Mellel, all CJK characters are garbled. Exporting from Scrivener as RTF and importing into Mellel produces the same result, as does opening the RTF file in Nisus, copying it, and pasting it into Mellel. The inability to properly import CJK files has always been a major deficiency of Mellel, but previously it was at least possible to copy Scrivener files and paste them into Mellel without any problem.

This doesn't happen when files are copied in other applications apart from Scrivener and pasted into Mellel, and so I'm not sure whether the problem lies with Scrivener or Mellel. But since it doesn’t happen when Scrivener files are pasted or imported into other applications, I am wondering if it is in some way related to the latest Mellel update. Has anyone else experienced the same problem? And is there any solution, apart from copying as plain text (which does not cause this problem but removes all the formatting)?

Rolf

[rwg]

I recently realised that something similar happens with Pages too. If I open a Japanese Word document in Pages, copy it, and paste it into Mellel, everything is garbled. If I open the same document in Nisus, copy it, and paste it into Mellel, there is no problem. But a Japanese file exported from Scrivener as a .doc file still results in garbled characters when opened in Nisus, copied, and pasted into Mellel. Can anyone explain what is going on here?

Rolf

[daiyi]

I'm having the same issue with Chinese. Would love to hear any conjectures too.

[rpcameron]

Has anyone checked to see what encoding the CJK files are in? For the Japanese files, are they in (Shift-)JIS, EUC, UTF8, UTF18, &c.? Likewise, does anyone know the encoding of the Chinese files (Big5, Unicode, &c.)? While it seems there shouldn't be a problem opening a file, it is likely that this is the point where the error in opening the files occurs. As long as the encoding is explicitly declared, I don't think there should be a problem; if there is a problem opening a document with an explicitly declared encoding, then this is a bug in the program (assuming the program claims to support the encoding).

However, it has been my experience that many programs handle CJK files differently, and few explicitly declare the encoding within the file itself. While it might be nice to claim this as a bug in Mellel, it is more likely that something is (quite literally) "lost in translation".

[gpolberd]

I recently realised that something similar happens with Pages too. If I open a Japanese Word document in Pages, copy it, and paste it into Mellel, everything is garbled. If I open the same document in Nisus, copy it, and paste it into Mellel, there is no problem. But a Japanese file exported from Scrivener as a .doc file still results in garbled characters when opened in Nisus, copied, and pasted into Mellel. Can anyone explain what is going on here?

Rolf

I work with classical Chinese, so this would be a problem for me. However, contrary to what Rolf and the others have stated, when I open my .doc files, whether with Word or Pages, and then copy and paste into Mellel, I have no problems. The styling of the text doesn't come through when copied from Pages, but it does when from Word. Furthermore, I have been copying and pasting Chinese text from a Taiwanese search engine (Academia Sinica's search engine) without any trouble. Finally, I just translated a Word document into RTF that has Chinese text in the main text and in the footnotes and opened that with Mellel. No trouble with the Chinese coming through. So I don't understand what is the trouble. I have no tricky or complicated language settings or any other software running that would help in translation. Perhaps the problem isn't completely with Mellel, or with Mellel at all?

[rwg]

It is interesting to learn that others are not having any problem pasting or opening CJK files in Mellel. If the problem does not lie with Mellel, what could be causing it? And why doesn't it happen when pasting or opening the same files in other programmes? (Perhaps I should mention that I am still using 10.4.11.) I also find it curious that when importing an RTF file into Mellel there are no options for CJK encodings under the source encoding pop-up menu. But since gpolberd can open Chinese RTF files in Mellel without any problem, perhaps this isn't an issue. I wonder if the Redlers could shed some light on the problem.

Rolf