Re: Fw: Unicode filename problems

From: Raymond Mercier (RaymondM@compuserve.com)
Date: Sat May 31 2003 - 07:18:13 EDT

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: [OT] Unicode filename problems"

    This question of non-Ascii filenames is a real problem : hardly any
    software out there can cope with this.
    I did not know of RAR, but have given it a try. Even here there is a
    serious problem, because if the filename is non-Ascii the name of the
    compressed file comes out as _____.rar, with as many underlines as there
    were characters in the original name. In fact it is a bit less predictable
    : if the name is Greek, for example, you get Latin letters, if it is
    Cyrillic, just the underline.
    This is useless then if you have a number of filenames all with the same
    number of characters.
    Certainly more work is needed on RAR (at least on the Win 2000 version).

    I know about that, since I made my Fontlist 5 work properly with arbitrary
    non-ascii names :
    http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/RaymondM/fontlist5.htm .

    Raymond Mercier

    At 22:58 30/05/2003 -0500, you wrote:
    >
    >I wonder if anyone here has ideas on these matters.
    >
    >Peter
    >
    >----- Forwarded by Peter Constable/IntlAdmin/WCT on 05/30/2003 10:56 PM
    >-----
    >
    >
    >I have 3 LinguaLinks lexicons that I have converted into HTML pages - one
    >for each entry. The languages use non-ANSI characters, so I also did a
    >Unicode conversion at the same time.
    >
    >[snip]
    >
    >Everything works very well except that I cannot burn the files onto a CD
    >because of the unicode values in the filenames. Roxio and Nero CD-burners
    >don't accept some of the higher values found in the file names (using
    >Jolliet, ISO9600 and UDF). Anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?
    >For example, a filename with unicode value 026B, a tilde lower case L,
    >causes problems.
    >
    >In the meantime, to get it onto CD, I decided to try and zip all the
    >files. Turns out almost all the zippers out there DO NOT support Unicode
    >filenames. Doug Rintoul found WinRAR
    >(http://www.rarlab.com/rar_archiver.htm) which does the trick in the RAR
    >format only. There is a RAR expander for Macintosh and Linux systems as
    >well (all of these are $29 USD). So far, have not found a freeware
    >solution that meets unicode filename needs. Have any of you run into this
    >yet?
    >
    >I could try to determine what Unicode values are causing problems on the
    >CD burner and do an unacceptable-to-acceptable character translation in
    >the filenames and the links to those filenames ... but that seems like a
    >huge compromise. Also, it will be difficult to come up with a generic
    >solution ... that is to say, I don't know what RANGE of values are
    >unacceptable for characters in a CD filename. Jolliet is supposed to allow
    >Unicode filenames according to the documentation I have seen.
    >
    >Larry



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