Hello Rick, On Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 10:32 AM, Rick Davis wrote:
> TextEdit seems to work nicely with RTF and Unicode (although I am not > a "power user"), but I've discovered a deficiency in opening files. I > have a whole bunch of text files in Big5 (Traditional Chinese) > encoding downloaded from Web pages. These are no problem for Nisus > Writer, which easily renders them when you force them into a > Traditional Chinese font. But for some reason TextEdit cannot render > them in Chinese, even when I choose Big5 encoding from the Open... > dialog, change to a Traditional Chinese font, etc. I always get a > screenful of garbage. > > So while at the outset TextEdit looks like a multilingual dream, it > stumbles on simple tasks like this. > > One can only hope that NW X will not have this problem. Do you mean you cannot open any Big5 file with TextEdit? -- Are all the characters garbled? Or only a few of them? There are many variants of "Traditional Chinese" encoding, and in the "Customize Encoding List" panel that appears when you press the pop-up menu "Plain Text Encoding" in Open file dialog in TextEdit, some of them, at least, are listed. I tried to open Big5-ETen (*) files with TextEdit, and failed, although I tried many Traditional Chinese encodings listed in the "Customize Encodings List" (amon which of course the variant "Traditional Chinese (Windows, DOS)"). This is certainly a bug -- a big bug! Did Apple test to open Traditional Chinese files before releasing this TextEdit...? As you write, I can open these files without problem in Nisus Writer; the "ETen" characters are garbled of course, but that is not a big deal. When I tried to copy and paste that text from NW to TE, TE failed to display correctly the text (it was the same thing as when I opened the same files in TE with "Traditional Chinese (MacOS)" as the encoding option). I deleted all the ETen characters from these files; and this time, I could copy the text in NW and paste it in TE without problem, and I could open them directly from TE, with the encoding "Traditional Chinese (MacOS)". The best solution that I could find so far is to convert the file with Cyclone (from "Windows: Traditional Chinese (CP950)" to "Unicode: Unicode 3.0: Default"). At my surprise, Cyclone can convert Big5-ETen files without problem: even ETen characters seem to be converted correctly. Then open the converted file with TE (Encoding: "Automatic"), and "Make Rich Text" from the Format menu. You may perhaps try yourself. Best regards, Nobumi Iyanaga Tokyo, Japan ============ (*) Big5-ETen is an extended version of Big5, usually used in Windows and IBM; I found web pages about it: http://isweb11.infoseek.co.jp/computer/wakaba/table/big5-note.ja.html; http://www.din.or.jp/~khoming/china/aroundbig5.htm (in Japanese; the latter is particularly interesting for anyone interested in Unicode...) The "pure Big5" is encoded between A140 to C67E and C940 to F9D5, but ETen adds 365 characters mapped between C6A1 and C8D3 (these were in DOS, but not [officially] in Windows), and 39 characters mapped between F9D6 and F9DC (these are in DOS and Windows). The characters mapped between C6A1 and C8D3 are listed in http://www.din.or.jp/~khoming/china/aroundbig5.htm; those between F9D6 and F9DC can be found in http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5080.Adobe-CNS1-4.pdf (a big file of 9MB!): they are numbered in this list as 14056 to 14096. The "ETen" characters are --------------------------------------------------- The Nisus Interactive List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Searchable archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/nisus-interactive%40nisus.com/ To unsubscribe from this list please send a message with "unsubscribe nisus-interactive" in the body of the email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
