From: Alan G Isaac (aisaac@american.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 23:49:05 EDT
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:58:21 -0700 (PDT) Dom Lachowicz <domlachowicz@yahoo.com> wrote:
> If you want to be 100% sure, Save As->Encoded Text->US
> ASCII
Aha. I did not know this wd produce a follow-up menu.
The interface now makes sense to me.
*But* the problem I mentioned persists.
Non-ASCII characters are replaced by '?'.
> ISCII is for Indian language support. I wouldn't
> suggest using it unless you were writing in an Indic
> script. It also isn't enabled in AbiWord 2.0 builds.
> I am, however, outraged and disguisted that you
> thought that it was an anti-American statement. Stop
> the drivel.
I'm sorry I failed to amuse you, but don't lose sight of my
point. The point was that many people will not know what
this means. To fix that most easily, it seems it shd be
another SaveAs/EncodedText option, no?
Also I made another point: ISCII export substitutes '?'
for characters outside the character set, regardless of the
existence of standard conventions for imitating them.
Now I don't know enough about ISCII usage to be sure the
conventions are standard for that user group, but the case
seems solid enough for ASCII.
> “ etc... are SGML entities. They are *not* meant
> for plaintext. Using such a thing in plaintext would
> be in violation of just about every "standard
> convention" imaginable.
You missed my point. Consider the xhtml document below. It
contains a couple entities for which there are pretty
standard substitutes. (Normal quote for “ the
consecutive hyphens for —)
Now import it into AbiWord. Oh wait, AbiWord doesn't like
entities yet. OK, import it into Word, export it to .doc,
and then import it into AbiWord. Everything looks fine.
Now export it as ASCII text. Observe the replacements with
'?' in the resulting file.
My request for "reasonably clever" ASCII export was
addressed to this problem: how one handles characters
outside the character set. Contrast with, e.g., how
Word handles the same export: I don't Word's choice of
a single hyphen for the —, but it is at least
a reasonable choice.
Hope that is clearer.
I love AbiWord and just want to love it more.
Alan Isaac
PS The xhtml document referenced above follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US">
<head>
<title>is it wise?</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
“Test this.”—and see what happens.
</p>
</body></html>
-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Wed Oct 15 2003 - 00:03:34 EDT