Hussein: One of our users recently ran into a frustrating situation. He had a <link> element whose href attribute was set as a relative URI to a sound file in MP3 format. The sound file was on his hard disk in a subdirectory of where the main file is located. (This is for the XLingPaper custom configuration files we have for use with XXE, but I suspect that is not a factor.) The file name included accented vowels. As an example, one was
ɔ̀kɔ́ àbɔ̀n.mp3 (The name may not come through correctly in this email. The Unicode characters are: U+0254 U+0300 k U+0254 U+0301 (space) a U+0300 b U+0254 U+0300 n . m p 3.) When he used the Browse Files... option in the Attributes Editor of XXE, the result was %C9%94%CC%80k%C9%94%CC%81%20%C3%A0b%C9%94%CC%80n.mp3 I understand that this is the same file name using percent-encoding (with UTF-8 encoding values) for those requiring it with the exception that the acute a in the file name is two Unicode characters (U+0061 U+0300) while the acute a in the URI is one Unicode character (U+00E0). Apparently, this difference is crucial. The problem becomes clear when the user's XML file is converted to either a web page output or a PDF output and the user clicks on the link. The browser or PDF reader indicates that it will look for the correct file name (at least, it looks correct - one can see the acute a, for example), but these applications report that they could not find the file. Looking at the web page, the file name is exactly as the URI returned from the Attributes Editor as given above. Similarly for the PDF file. So why is it that everything looks good, but these applications say that they cannot find the file? From what we can tell, the problem is for characters like the acute accented a. The file system on the user's hard drive uses the decomposed form (NFD) of the acute a (i.e. it is U+0061 U+0300) while the result of the Browse Files... option in the Attributes Tool (U+00E0) uses the composed form (NFC). When the composed form is used by a web browser or PDF reader, there is a mismatch to the file name on the hard drive so the file cannot be found. Is this a known issue with the Browse Files... dialog box in the Attributes Tool? That is, is it known that this tool converts NFD format to NFC? Is there a preferences setting that can be set to control this? Is there some other work-around available? Thanks so much, --Andy -- XMLmind XML Editor Support List [email protected] http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support
